Cancer and AIDS – Treatment Vs A Cure

There are hundreds of incurable diseases plaguing the world today, if not more. Two of the biggest and probably more well known are, Cancer and AIDS.

Over the last 10 and a 1/2 years, roughly 20 billion dollars or more has been attributed to AIDS research. Cancer research gets a few billion themselves each year, roughly 5 billion.

Treatment for both AIDS and Cancer can cost $50,000 and likely more, annually. An estimated 3 million people die because of AIDS a year, and 8 million people die from Cancer each year.

Between these two diseases, you can see how much money is coming in from them. Both money being spent on research, and the current treatment costs, make for very large pockets. So, what if all of a sudden, with all that money, time and research, they would finally discover a cure for either one, or both? Hypothetically of course.

Well, with a cure, you wouldn’t need to research it anymore, so there goes the billions spent each year on research. Also, the treatment would go down by at least a 3rd in total costs. With such drastic losses in monetary income for these two, there are only 2 directions they could go in order to maintain the flow of finances, either:

A.) Jack up the prices of all the appointments, X-rays and treatment to cover the cost, or

B.) They would have to cut jobs, and trim budgets.

But, alas, there hasn’t been any cure as of yet that has been accepted. But with such harsh drawbacks from finding a cure, would they even release it to the public if they did discover one? Even if they implemented solution ‘A’, they would still likely have to use ‘B’ to some extent, and that could potentially mean a lot of jobs cut, which would lead further into the unemployment problem we are currently facing today.

It almost sounds fair, when you think of all the jobs lost alone across the country and elsewhere from finding a cure, to go ahead and suppress it. A job lost means an empty table, no food for the kids, and possibly no roof over their heads for very much longer. This would be very sad indeed.

But, if you where to compare, Jobs lost vs. Lives lost, one easily overshadows the other. Though no food on the table and maybe no roof is sad, a job is replaceable, a life is not. Worse yet would be the life lost of a loved one to AIDS, only to find out a cure did exist, but was suppressed.

Of course this is all hypothetical, right? The world isn’t that sad. People always have the best of intentions, and always lend a helping hand. If a cure was to be discovered, it would quickly be put into every hospital, to save as many of those 8 million lives from cancer, or 3 million lives from AIDS, as they could. Despite the drop in income, and the jobs lost… Wouldn’t they?

A Patient Cured is a Customer Lost.

…what if it wasn’t hypothetical?