As this NBCNEWS.com article points out, cancer treatment is way too expensive. The real ignorance here, however, is not in an inability to answer to this obvious question. Any more than this one aspect of inappropriate valuation is the right question to be asking in the first place.
The problem is the insane economic operating system that values net gain more than any thing else. And not just net gain in and of itself, but whatever the marketer can get away with. A system which actually prides itself in encouraging the marketer to behave in exactly that manner.
If city sized groups of individuals were in charge of both production decisions, as well as owning the responsibility of maintaining collective production capability, the only factor in deciding what should be produced is the willingness of those individuals to apply the effort, and resource, to make the production happen. Doing so precisely because they thought it was worth such effort and resource.
Such an arrangement is not rocket science. It is simply a reasoned conclusion of what cooperation, personal involvement, and technology, in balance, can accomplish.
Setting it up, on the other hand, is something that will be extremely difficult. Make no mistake. Saying that, however, does not make it impossible. It just means that the commitment to make it happen will have to be total for everyone who can see that business as usual isn't working any more. It is, in fact, quite unsustainable. It is driving us all insane even as it destroys the planet.
Perhaps the big takeaway here is that the real cancer is Capitalism metastasizing on the carcinogen of electrified money. A cancer that is eating away at everything.
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