Cancer in America Is Way Down, For the Wealthy Anyway (bloomberg.com)

The good news is that cancer in America was beaten back over the 25 years ending 2016, with death rates plummeting, particularly when it comes to the four most common types of the dreaded affliction. From a report: There's a caveat, however. Those gains have been reaped mostly by the well-off. While racial disparities have begun to narrow, the impact of limited access to treatment for the poorest Americans has increased wealth-based inequality, according to the American Cancer Society's annual update on trends and statistics. "Any time you have a disease as serious as cancer, when you have a substantial reduction in deaths, that's a notable achievement," said Len Lichtenfeld, the interim chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society. "But there are still a lot of areas for improvement."

Health insurance and access to care can be an issue in some poor and rural portions of the country, where there are higher death rates of colon, cervical and lung cancers, according to Cancer Statistics 2019. While poverty was actually associated with lower rates of cancer mortality prior to the 1980s, that trend has since reversed, due in part to changes in diet and smoking as well as screening and treatment rates, the health organization said.

Comments

Re:True for all medical conditions

[GLMDesigns]

Pathetic. Capitalism is the economic system where people invest in solutions in order to make money. Try have a socialist, top-down economic structure get Thanksgiving Turkeys to every store in a continent wide country. It will not get done. The attempt to accomplish this will be abandoned as impossible and impractical.

And yet thousands of business coordinate their activities to accomplish just this. Now multiply this throughout the economy.

Abject poverty was the standard throughout the world in 1800 and now, after two centuries of industrialized capitalism we have people declare the economic freedom is evil and the cause of poverty.