The American Cancer Society is doing a big push to lobby Congress to increase funding for cancer research. ACS claims that cancer research funding has decreased by 24% in real dollars once you adjust for inflation since 2003. A House committee has pledged $2 billion dollars for research as part of the 21st Century Cures proposal. We’ll see how that goes.

But federal funding isn’t the whole story. There is a lot of private funding for cancer research… because cancer drugs make a lot of money. A new report says that spending on cancer drugs topped $100 billion in 2014. That’s up 10% from 2013, and up $75 billion from just five years ago. And the treatments and early screenings are working: Two-thirds of Americans diagnosed with cancer are living at least five years, up from just half of Americans with cancer living that long in the ‘90s.

You don’t have to put on your tinfoil hat to ask: why would anybody cure this thing? An individual researcher might be desperate to find a cancer cure: those Nobel Prizes aren’t going to win themselves. But at a corporate level, it doesn’t even make economic sense. Cancer treatments are making $100 billion dollars with no signs of slowing down. How much did private industry make from nobody having polio last year?

The best reason to still work for a cure to cancer is that the treatments still suck, relative to other things. If the flu shot involved jamming you with a cattle-prod until you vomited, cutting off your testicles or breasts, and then waiting around to see if the flu came back next year… we’d probably be looking for a more long term solution to the affliction.

That’s why federal funding is so key to find cures to various cancers. We don’t want “the market to decide” how to best allocate resources here. The market isn’t going to lead us to where we want to go.

[Photo from Flickr user Images Money]