Economics and Inequities in Cancer Care: AVBCC Keynote Address

December 2020, Vol 11, No 6

Greg Simon, JD, led the Cancer Moonshot program for the Obama administration, raising $1.8 billion in new funding for cancer research and the development of new cancer programs. In 2017, Joe Biden called on him to serve as President of the Biden Cancer Initiative. Mr Simon is also a survivor of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a consultant and public speaker at Simonovation, LLC, and one of the thought leaders in cancer care.

At the 10th Annual Summit of the Association for Value-Based Cancer Care (AVBCC) in 2020, he challenged participants to think in new ways about the economics and inequities of the cancer care ecosystem.

Mr Simon noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed racial and economic injustices in America, including the US healthcare system.

“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,” Mr Simon said. “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 [chimeric antigen receptor] T-cell and immunotherapies that are unaffordable and inaccessible to minority populations and other underserved communities.”

Mr Simon proposed dramatic changes to the US healthcare pricing system, such as a “futures market” similar to that used in the oil and farm commodities.

“We cannot fix our healthcare with the economic and financial capital market system we use today,” Mr Simon said.

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