When Elijah Alexander, a former NFL linebacker, was diagnosed in his 30s with a particularly aggressive form of multiple myeloma, or bone marrow cancer, he did not despair. He found reason to hope.

Under a traditional treatment regime, bone marrow transplants (the same regime my mother endured a decade ago when she too suffered, and finally succumbed, to multiple myeloma), Elijah had shrunk to nearly half his playing weight, and his chances of living for a year were less than 50 percent. But then he started a new drug, Revlimid. Within weeks he was in the gym and back to work, and months later he started the Tackle Myeloma Foundation to help others find help and support facing the same disease he had battled. As Elijah tells anyone who will listen, Revlimid “was the difference between just being alive and living a life.”

 

Yet today there are those who regard breakthroughs like Revlimid as the problem with our healthcare system. They claim that the key to saving money is to first slow the introduction and use of such medical breakthroughs by having economists compare new innovations to old treatments with the goal of just not paying for some new treatments at all. In this regard, some — such as Alan Garber of Stanford University, who serves on the Institute of Medicine panel deciding on what economists should study — have even suggested that orphan drugs, many of which have been developed to treat rare, fatal illnesses for children, while laudable, do not meet the “traditional criteria for cost-effectiveness.”

For this reason, the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest is launching a new program called The Odyssey Project on Biomedical Innovation. Our purpose is to dispel the notion that new technologies are the problem with healthcare and to point out that the policies that flow from it are misguided and place human health in peril.

We find it ironic that an initiative to support innovation is even needed. Yet, the attempt to ration biomedical innovation is being led by many of the same organizations, academics, journalists, entertainers and politicians who view the entrepreneurial activity flourishing around “green” technologies as an opportunity to solve environmental problems and promote economic prosperity.

For instance, just last year a publication of the National Academy of Sciences’ Board on Science, Technology and Policy, chaired by Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, noted that the commercialization of biomedical knowledge holds the promise “to find solutions to some of the critical problems arising from population growth and demographic change, from new medical treatments to improving agricultural output and developing new sources of energy.”  Yet now that he is in a position to advocate for this view, Mr. Summers now claims that experts using “the right kind of cost-effectiveness … estimate that we could take as much as $700 billion a year out of our healthcare system” by eliminating unnecessary procedures, particularly new technologies.

In fact, biomedical innovation is not the problem with healthcare. Rather, as demonstrated over the past 50 years, the commercialization of medical discoveries offers tremendous near- and long-term economic opportunity and a solution to the many healthcare challenges facing America.

New medicines and increased medical care explain most of the increase in life expectancy since 1950 and by extension, wealth creation. According to University of Chicago economists Robert Topel and Kevin Murphy, from 1970 to 2000 increased longevity added approximately $3.2 trillion per year to national wealth, the equivalent of half of the average annual gross domestic product over the period. Half of these gains were due to progress against heart disease alone. Reduced mortality from heart disease increased the value of life by about $1.5 trillion per year since 1970.

The benefits from future breakthroughs will be greater still. Instead of investing in rationing, our health system should invest in personalized and prospective medicine, which is the next generation of medical innovation. A recent study found that just being able to delay the progression of Alzheimer’s with earlier prediction and treatment could be worth $4 trillion over the next 20 years.

Rather than trying to save money by denying care to those who need our care the most, we should create wealth and save lives by investing in keeping people as well as possible and as long as possible. In the healthcare debate about to begin, The Odyssey Project will create a pathway for policies to be identified and implemented that can sustain that promise.

Former Rep. Ferguson (R-N.J.) is a senior fellow at the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and is chairman and CEO of Washington-based Ferguson Strategies LLC.  CMPI is funded in part by donations from pharmaceutical and biotech companies.