American Cancer Society vs. Cancer Patients

In today’s New York Post, Cato’s Michael Tanner takes on the American Cancer Society’s recent announcement that it will spend its entire ad budget for a year plugging government health care:

The American Cancer Society announced recently that it will spend its entire advertising budget next year not on urging Americans to stop smoking or get mammograms, but on campaigning for a government takeover of the U.S. health-care system. This is perverse: It’s hard to imagine anything worse for cancer patients than government-run health care.

For all its faults and all the criticism that it has received, the United States’ free-market health-care system has made America the place you want to be if you have a serious illness.

Cancer patients understand this. The overall five-year survival rate for all types of cancer for men in America is 66.3 percent, and 62.9 percent for women, the best outcome in the world.

We shouldn’t be surprised. The one common characteristic of all national health-care systems is that they ration care.

And what are the results of that rationing?  Much higher death rates for those who get cancer:

And less than 25 percent of U.S. women die from breast cancer. In Britain, it’s 46 percent; France, 35 percent; Germany, 31 percent; Canada, 28 per- cent; Australia, 28 percent, and New Zealand, 46 percent.

So remember, next time you hear someone touting government-run health care, they’re advocating a system in which people with serious illnesses — the sickest among us — are worse off.