563,700

I don't understand our national obsession with the War on Terrorism, either.

I'm 29 years old and I've been cancer-free for 15 months. I'd never even heard of kidney cancer before my doctor spoke those horrible words. I'll never know what caused it or how to keep from getting it again. And it kills me that so little money is being put into medical research when the fact is that one in four people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime.

The federal government actually declared war on cancer in 1970. To date, they've spent less on that than they did in the first phase of the second War on Iraq. It's time to start funding the war on disease and providing healthcare for everyone inside our borders.

We CAN and MUST fight both wars. Too many lives are at stake.

That was my comment on this most eloquent post, from The Thin Blue Line.

563,700 people will die of cancer this year. Between now and sunrise Friday we will lose more Americans to cancer than we lost on 9/11. We will have 187 Cancer-9/11’s this year. In the next 14 months, more Americans will die from cancer than have died in every single American war in history…combined.

We as a country have become singularly obsessed with the issue of terrorism. Why don’t politicians ever base their campaigns on which candidate would do the best job fighting (insert your most hated disease here)?

Perhaps it is just because bombs are far more exciting to watch on television. Let’s face it: pretty explosions on the 6:00 news offer better entertainment value than watching a patient get his/her chemotherapy treatment.

Last week I attended a conference that addressed progress in the fight for cures against a particular form of cancer. I can not tell you how many times the doctors said “If we had more money, we could do x, y, and z.” How many American lives could we save, and how much suffering could we alleviate, if we fought disease with the same passion with which we fight terrorism? What could the medical community accomplish with an additional $200 billion a year? I’m not saying we should divert money from fighting terrorism for the sake of fighting disease. We can do both.

What if that money were put entirely in to preventive medicine so we could detect cancer early or prevent heart disease from ever occurring? How much additional money would the American economy save if we could pre-empt just a small portion of the ungodly medical bills that accompany ungodly diseases?

How many Americans would suffer less if they had access to basic healthcare?

Sure, we already put some money in to disease prevention/cures and healthcare. Yet we don't even come close to providing the resources that the gravity of the situation demands.

And this isn’t just about money. It’s about ideas. We need to have a national discussion on how government can be most effective in fighting the war on (insert your most hated disease here). We need to develop a national strategy to fight disease as urgently as we need to develop a national strategy to fight terror.

I have always been a foreign policy guy. But can we stop pretending that terrorism is the only threat to our daily lives? It is far more likely that our lives will be altered by a cell gone bad than by a Muslim gone bad.