Cancer Patients Sacrificed On Trump's Altar
Guest article by Michael Cohen
Every one of us, bar none, knows someone who has been stolen from us by cancer. The curse spares no one. I’ve watched it hollow out children who never got to play ball in the park, teenagers who never got to feel their first kiss, young parents who never saw their kids graduate, and elders who deserved the dignity of growing old but were instead chewed apart by a disease that has no conscience. Cancer doesn’t care about your politics, your bank account, your religion, or the color of your skin. It doesn’t discriminate. It devours.
And yet, here we are in America, in 2025, watching the Trump administration take a sledgehammer to the very system we’ve spent decades building to fight this killer. Who asked for this? Who benefits from it? Why is this happening?
Let’s back up for a second. More than 50 years ago, America declared war on cancer. At the time, there was naive optimism; the belief that beating cancer would be as straightforward as splitting the atom or putting a man on the moon. But cancer, it turns out, isn’t a singular enemy. It’s thousands of enemies, each mutation a different battlefield. There was no miracle cure, no single silver bullet. What we got instead was decades of hard-fought, incremental progress. And you know what? That progress saved lives.
In the 1970s, if you were diagnosed with cancer, you had barely a coin-flip’s chance of making it five years. Today, because of sustained investment, because of government funding, because we decided as a society that this was a war worth fighting, the survival rate has risen from 49 percent to 68 percent. Every $326 spent by our government on cancer research has bought one additional year of human life. Think about that: a single year, for the cost of a one-night standard hotel room. That’s not abstract. That’s mothers, fathers, children, and friends. That’s birthdays celebrated, graduations attended, weddings danced at. That is the one thing — no matter who you are — you just can’t buy. That’s time.
https://www.meidasplus.com/p/cancer-patients-sacrificed-on-trumps
= new reply since forum marked as read
Wow, I'm impressed. He gets it.
I'm old enough to remember when Richard Nixon (yes, HIM!) made the prediction that the US would find the cure for cancer in a very short time. I can't remember if he said "in our lifetime," or maybe it was "by the end of this century." Either way it was very inaccurate.
Cancer has become a growth industry, and some suppliers in this industry are making boatloads of money. The rest of us are paying those suppliers, in one way or another. Not that we all have cancer or that we're going to get the dreaded disease, but we ARE paying taxes and we ARE paying for medical insurance. Also we're holding fundraisers for our loved ones who can't afford the treatments, etc. That's how it works: when people fear death, they'll give any amount of money to avoid it.
I'm sorry to sound so cynical. But I DO believe that the cure for cancer could have been found years ago. They probably found it already, but it was abandoned because there wasn't enough profit in it.
