Greg Simon led the Cancer Moonshot program for the Obama administration, raising $1.8 billion in funding for cancer research and the development of new programs. In 2017, Joe Biden called on him to serve as President of the Biden Cancer Initiative. In the October 22 session of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care (AVBCC) 10th Annual Summit, Mr Simon—a cancer survivor himself—challenged participants to think in new ways about the economics and disparities of the current cancer care ecosystem.
Mr Simon noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the racial and economic injustices in American society. “It’s baked into the system: inequitable access to healthcare and inequitable impacts on minority communities, not just of COVID-19 but of cancer in general. We have known this for a generation, and we have done very little about it. We cannot get the system back up and running the way it was. We cannot afford to continue developing miracle cures for cancer like CAR-T and immunotherapies that are unaffordable and inaccessible to minority populations and other underserved communities.”
He also proposed dramatic new changes to the healthcare pricing system, such as a “futures market” similar to those used in oil and farm commodities. “We cannot fix our healthcare with the economic and financial capital market system we use today,” Mr Simon said.
Be sure to stay tuned for the end of the session, which features a provocative and wide-ranging discussion of these and other concepts as AVBCC Co-Founder Burt Zweigenhaft poses his own questions, as well as questions from participants.
If you haven’t registered for the AVBCC Summit, now is the time! You don’t want to miss out on this timely and insightful keynote session, or the 40-plus other webcasts featuring top experts from every area on the cancer care continuum.
