The American Cancer Society, which will never get a dime of my money, has dedicated its entire advertising budget, not to promoting cancer avoidance (warnings about tobacco, promotion of good diet, etc.), but to promoting the cancer of state-run medicine:
American Cancer Society Says Broken Health Care System Will Be “Bigger Killer” Than Tobacco
(Mike Tanner’s comment here.)
I agree…finding a cure for cancer or educating the public for prevention is not profitable.
I remind the poster that the American Cancer Society is a non-profit charity that raises funds on the grounds that they help to promote research on the causes and treatment of cancer and to educate the public about behavior (smoking, being overweight, bad diet are good examples) that increase one’s risk exposure to cancer. Those are laudable goals and many people give the ACS funds to fulfill them. Will socialized medicine save people from cancer? The claim is risible.
But in fact, the commentator simply doesn’t know what he or she is talking about. Finding a cure for cancer would be quite profitable. (Of course, cancer is not one thing, but there are many, many kinds of cancer, and it seems the case that we have to take them on one-by-one.) Pharmaceutical firms invest huge amounts of money searching for cures and treatments. Why? Because it’s profitable. And the commentator should hope it remains profitable until “the cure” is found. That will be, indeed, why it will be more likely to be found. Hateful bashing of pharmaceutical firms is popular because thoughtless people assume that the drugs are somehow already there (in some secret warehouses?) and “big companies” just charge people for access, thus condemning to death those who can’t get them. In fact, the drugs and treatments have to be discovered/invented. They don’t “already exist.” And if we want more to be developed, we should hope for super normal profits in the pharmaceutical industry, to attract capital and labor.
Not profitable? What does the commentator mean? I can hardly imagine commodity that would rise higher demand then the medicine able to cure the cancer. And the thing is that it won’t be just single wave. The cancer, unfortunately, will continue developing in new man and woman, therefore, the demand is not likely to decrease over any observable future. THIS WILL BE ONE OF THE MOST PROFITABLE BUSINESSES.
And to prevent objections like “it’s non ethical to make profit on the life of fellow Terrans”, I will just mention that, whether human or not, the only thing able to produce the medicine (like any other innovation) is incentive of getting profit. No other driving force will lead us to the promotion, and this is demonstrated by the whole course of human history. As for the ethicality, don’t you think those who produce something able to save millions of lives deserve rewarding? I think they do.