For evidence of the astounding progress made by medical science in recent decades, look no further than the Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, which was jointly issued by the American Cancer Society, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries, and the National Cancer Institute late last month.
Death rates from the disease have fallen steadily since the beginning of this century.
Between 2018 and 2022, they declined 1.5% per year.
America's health system is getting better and better at preventing, detecting, diagnosing, and treating cancer.
Patients are living longer, fuller lives as a result.
But this kind of steady progress is far from automatic.
The decline in the cancer mortality rate is one of many hard-won achievements made possible by America's market-oriented medical research ecosystem.
Sadly, policy changes enacted during the Biden administration have tampered with this ecosystem — and are already harming efforts to defeat cancer and other serious diseases.
The new report may understate how far we have come in the fight against cancer. A January study by the American Cancer Society found that cancer death rates have plummeted 34% since 1991.
That amounts to more than 4.5 million lives saved.
The same study revealed that cancer mortality rates among children have dropped 70% since 1970.
The progress against lung cancer is particularly remarkable. Although it remains the leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States, nationwide survival rates have increased by 26% over the last five years.
Such sizable gains would have been impossible without the development of more sophisticated techniques for detecting the various forms of the disease — and better therapies for treating it.
In the last decade, biopharmaceutical companies have invested some $800 billion in research into new therapies for a host of diseases.
These investments have paid dividends for cancer patients in particular.
Take Merck's breakthrough immunotherapy Keytruda.
First given the go-ahead by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2014 for treating advanced melanoma, the therapy has been approved for 40 different cancers — from non-small cell lung cancer to lymphoma and head and neck cancer.
Moving medical science forward so consistently is not just risky but expensive. It takes an estimated $2.6 billion and more than a decade to bring a drug from the lab through the regulatory approval process and to patients.
Pharmaceutical companies need to show that they'll have a shot at earning a return on that investment if they're to attract the capital they need to underwrite drug research.
The United States has traditionally offered the prospect of those returns, given that private interests cover just over half of health spending.
Companies want to launch their products here because they have greater freedom to set their prices than they would in countries where governments set the prices of medicines.
As of October 2022, countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development had access to just 29% of medicines launched between 2012 and 2021 through government health programs, on average.
In the United States, 85% of new drugs were available through public insurance plans.
This might help explain why the American cancer mortality rate is lower than in other developed nations.
But America's decades-long march towards more effective cancer treatments now faces its most daunting obstacle in years with the Inflation Reduction Act's price controls on prescription drugs.
The IRA gave the federal government the power to dictate the price of a growing number of drugs through Medicare — and effectively embraced the very policies that restrict access abroad.
The consequences for medical innovation — and particularly for research into pill-based or "small molecule" therapies for cancer — are proving quite stark already.
Data from a forthcoming analysis by economist Genia Long shows that, in 2024, the number of new small molecule cancer drugs entering clinical testing each month dropped by 43% compared to the average before the IRA's price controls became law.
If those figures are any indication, the era in which American-led biomedical innovation gradually beat back cancer may be coming to a close.
What a tragedy it would be if this year's annual report on the status of cancer in this country was the last one to show progress against this devastating disease.
Sally C. Pipes is President, CEO, and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Pacific Research Institute. Her latest book is "The World's Medicine Chest: How America Achieved Pharmaceutical Supremacy — and How to Keep It" (Encounter 2025). Follow her on X @sallypipes. Read Sally Pipes' Reports — More Here.
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