Smacking down Specter on cancer research

This weekend, weasely Senator Specter popped up on TV to blame Republicans for not funding cancer research and thus making it more likely that people like Jack Kemp and himself would die. That, of course, ignored the fact that he has purportedly recovered from his bout with Hodgkin's Disease and is now healthy enough as a 79-year old cancer survivor to run for six more years in the Senate. Some American medicine must have helped him or did he seek his medical care out of the country?

But the Wall Street Journal does an excellent job in exposing the vacuous reasoning in Specter's claim.

Presumably Mr. Specter was referring to funding for the National Institutes of Health, which now accounts for the vast majority of federal support for biomedical research. Between 1994 and 2006, when Republicans controlled Congress or the White House or both, NIH biomedical R&D spending more than doubled in real terms, jumping to $25 billion in 2003 from about $10 billion in the early 1990s. During the Bush years, it fell slightly after that, though holding relatively constant as a share of discretionary spending.

Criticizing the modest budget reduction to $23 billion in 2007 (in constant dollars) is thus a little like condemning K2 for not being Mount Everest. Still, Mr. Specter is right to note his consonance with the "Democrats' approach," which equates federal funding alone with medical innovation. NIH projects are valuable, but they are far from the only or even main reason that the U.S. is the world leader in new and better treatments for killers like cancer.

Let's not forget that government funding of health research is not the only way that research gets done in this country. We also have the incentive of the profit motive to encourage private businesses to research to find new treatments.

Most of the advances in biotechnology and pharmacogenomics that are revolutionizing the diagnosis and treatment of disease are occurring in America. One reason is a research environment that is less centralized, more competitive, tolerant of risk and richer in cash -- public, yes, but especially private. Between the 1990s and mid-2000s, more than four times as much medical venture capital was invested in the U.S. than in the European Union.

Another explanation is that the profits available in U.S. markets allow companies to cover the costs of converting the ideas gleaned from basic research into workable commercial medicines. To a large extent, patients in Western Europe, Canada and Japan -- which set strict caps on spending for medical technology -- are free-riding off the more open U.S. health-care system.

Of course, if we get the Democrats and Specter's preferred solution to our health care needs - a government-run health plan, we may abandon this model of medical research.

Democrats are now hoping to import those same models state-side. Nationalized health care inevitably results in large government bureaucracies that try to contain costs by restricting access to new therapies by limiting or denying payment or even restricting what doctors are allowed to prescribe. Yet the freedom, innovation and quality of health systems are all closely meshed, and the tragedy of "universal" health care will be the medicines that are never developed at all.

Mr. Specter will probably end up voting for all that. And since he joined his new party purely out of political self-interest, the least he can do in the meantime is to leave cancer patients out of it.

Specter has demonstrated that he will do anything in order to win, even use his own cancer and that of Jack Kemp to try to score cheap political points. The man is a slimy weasel. Will Pennsylvania Democrats really want this guy representing them?