Cancer Patients Sacrificed On Trump's Altar [View all]

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