Vice President Joe Biden last year tragically lost his son Beau to brain cancer at the age of 46. No parent should ever have to bury a child. And now Biden, ever the fighter, has responded with a personal commitment to eradicating cancer: “a new moon shot.”
At Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, President Obama handed him the keys to a new national effort against cancer. “I’m putting Joe in charge of mission control,” Obama said.
Biden tweeted the focus for this initiative, which is to “increase resources — both private and public — to fight cancer.” And also to “break down silos and bring all the cancer fighters together — to work together, share information, and end cancer as we know it.”
While we don’t yet know where the money’s going to come from, the sentiment is certainly laudable, and top cancer centers around the country — including MD Anderson in Houston, Sloan Kettering Memorial here in New York, Dana Farber in Boston and many others — certainly duplicate efforts that could be streamlined. (Though in my experience, the top researchers each know what the others are up to, and they frequently collaborate.)
There is also no doubt that we’re seeing important developments in the war on cancer. Major advances in immunotherapies, including vaccines, have enabled oncologists to directly target the surface of cancerous cells instead of using toxic chemicals that affect the whole body in an effort to stop cancer growth.
Cancer is often able to survive and grow by hiding from the immune system, but top researchers are finding ways to counter that for many of our worst cancers including lung, breast, melanoma and bone.
The treatments are often more effective and less toxic than traditional chemotherapy. And genetic therapies are being developed to counter the mutations that cause cancer to grow.
So what’s the catch? Well, President Obama is the wrong commander-in-chief for the war on cancer. His signature health care program, ObamaCare, may be responsible for signing up more than 16 million people who were previously uninsured, but the kind of health insurance they’re getting will hardly pay for the new treatments.
ObamaCare is one-size-fits-all; it usually pairs a high deductible (typically more than $5,000 per year) with low-quality care in a narrow network that excludes most top doctors, hospitals and drugs.
Plus, with all its regulations, taxes and penalties ($500 billion in new taxes in the first 10 years), ObamaCare stifles the very innovation necessary for drug companies to develop new cures. Research and development is currently growing much faster in Asia, India and Europe than in the United States.
And evolving, fast-growing cancer doesn’t suit one-size-fits-all treatments.
Exciting new cancer drugs will lead to more personalized care, meaning that the vaccine or directed antibody may respond to the proteins of your tumor but not someone else’s. Expensive drugs that only work well for small numbers of people are difficult to justify to insurance companies that participate in ObamaCare, especially when these treatments are very expensive.
And targeted therapies routinely cost over $100,000 a year per patient. Well worth it if it’s your life on the line, but ObamaCare isn’t designed to respond to your personalized medical needs.
Obama’s cancer pronouncement on Tuesday brings to mind another declared war on cancer — by President Richard Nixon, 45 years ago. But Nixon immediately put his money where his mouth was, asking for $100 million and signing the National Cancer Act into law. This act gave the National Cancer Institute the power and budget to develop many new lifesaving treatments.
There’s no doubt Joe Biden’s heart is in the right place. But this president is unlikely to give him the resources and flexibility he needs to succeed.
Dr. Marc Siegel is medical director of Doctor Radio at NYU Langone Medical Center and a Fox News medical correspondent.