It’s a 50-year-old movie, but that opening scene from Patton endures in the public consciousness. Every time American military leaders give a motivational speech – intentionally or not – they are channeling George C. Scott’s address to his troop.
At least that’s the impression I got when I heard President Biden say the following recently as part of the country’s ongoing “war on cancer.” He said:
That’s why I’m also calling on the science and medical communities to bring the boldest thinking to this fight. I’m calling on the private sector to develop and test new treatments, make drugs more affordable, share more data and knowledge that can inform the public and benefit every company’s research.
The thing that’s craziest about this is Biden calling on science to win a war while simultaneously crippling his soldiers.
The Democrats strategy on life-saving drugs has been to demand cheaper drugs now, (with an election in November) while ignoring the cost to humanity with fewer new drugs in the future. Make one kind of medicine more affordable now, kill twenty more new innovations tomorrow. Getting a drug to market is an expensive, laborious, and risky process that depends on the traditional American free market.
Democrats’ short-term health care strategy is winning a short-term victory for themselves while sabotaging any kind of long-term victory against cancer. Biden’s speech would be like Patton calling on his men to charge into Germany while taking away their boots and the keys to their tanks.
Cancer has touched many of our families. But you can’t wave a magic wand and fix cancer. Stopping cancer takes real work – in labs, boardrooms, and by government. And “work” means rolling up your sleeves and possibly doing something that your party might not agree with. It means making hard decisions that might not be popular but moving us in the right direction. It means looking at things through the eyes of an entrepreneur instead of a politician.
However, Biden is a politician.
One of the first tests that the administration faced after the announcement of the moonshot was a merger between two companies in the cancer space – Illumina and GRAIL. Instead of stepping aside and allowing these companies to merge – the administration decided to meddle. Illumina, a genetic-sequencing company, and GRAIL, which is developing blood tests for early cancer detection, sought a merger to allow them to do more together, but two companies consolidating their resources doesn’t fit with other areas of the administration’s agenda and doesn’t sit well with the president’s base.
So, instead of doing the hard thing and pursuing his so-called moonshot against cancer, the administration fought the merger. Fast forward a few months and now the administration has lost their case against the merger– costing the government money, the companies involved money and resources, and everyone has lost time that they will never get back.
And, the Patent Office the administration has gone the other way. To pursue their moonshot, they are allowing cancer-focused innovation to cut in front of other ideas on their way through the Patent Office. Could the patents they are bypassing effect heart disease – the number one killer? Maybe the bypassed patents could help solve/stop/avoid the next pandemic? Maybe the patents that are being slowed would solve migraines that effects our workforce in ways so significant that we aren’t even fully aware of the effects.
No, we might never know what innovations the slow-down will cost us.
On the other hand – the fact that the Patent Office can take six years to approve a patent is appalling and should be the point that the administration rolls up its sleeves and goes to work – not cutting in line.
Solving cancer is a valiant goal. But if it is merely talking points then Biden’s speech was an abhorrent lie. If the administration really wants to attack cancer, they need to roll up their sleeves and do the are hard – like rolling back government programs that interfere with research. The administration isn’t going to solve cancer themselves – but they can make life easier on the people who are going to solve cancer by getting out of their way.
As Patton famously said, “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” If he were alive today, he’d remind Smilin’ Joe Biden that no bastard ever won a war by attacking his own soldiers.
Charles Sauer is the President of the Market Institute, and the author of ‘Profit Motive: What Drives the Things We Do.’
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