Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [83]
There are also many good groups that work for more specific changes in health policy. One of the most effective is the National Breast Cancer Coalition, founded in 1991 by a group of dedicated women, one of whom, Fran Visco, a breast cancer survivor, is its president. Visco has become a worldclass advocate. Since its inception, the NBCC has created a nationwide grassroots advocacy network of more than six hundred organizations and seventy thousand breast cancer activists who lobby at the national, state, and local levels for public policies that improve breast cancer research, diagnostics, and treatment. Federal funding for breast cancer research increased from less than $90 million in 1991 to more than $800 million in 2003. When it was revealed that women in the military were more likely to develop breast cancer, NBCC lobbied for a special research project within the Department of Defense that secured about $2 billion in total funding. In 1993, the organization also produced and presented to me 2.6 million signatures supporting a National Action Plan on Breast Cancer involving government, private industry, scientists, and consumers. I accepted their proposal. In 2003, NBCC was the only grassroots organization cited as one of the twenty-five most influential groups in health policy in a survey of congressional staffers.
In 1996, Beth Kobliner Shaw, a New Yorker who has written a highly regarded book on saving and investing for young people in the workplace, learned that her father had prostate cancer. Besides becoming actively involved in her father’s care and treatment, she immersed herself in the state of prostate cancer research. When she discovered that despite the high prevalence of prostate cancer in men, there was wide disparity in federal funding for prostate cancer as opposed to breast cancer, she joined the National Prostate Cancer Coalition and became a one-woman campaign to convince the White House, and me personally, to close the gap. The Prostate Cancer Foundation credited her efforts for helping to gain a twenty-five-fold increase in government funding. Both Fran Visco and Beth Kobliner Shaw were private citizens living their own lives until cancer struck. Their response to it was to become highly committed and effective public servants. They prove just how much you can do if you have a cause you care about as much as they care about theirs.
Many working parents are having a hard time today. After staying essentially flat between 1979 and 1993, real family income rose each of the last seven years of the decade—over $8,000 per family—though it has fallen again by $1,300 since 2000, while much of our increased consumption has been fueled by maxed-out credit cards and second mortgages on homes. There were 5.37 million people who fell into poverty from 2000 to 2005; during the same time, there were 6.8 million more people without health insurance. More than half the bankruptcies of the last few years were caused by health emergencies. And the average wage of new jobs created in this decade is more than 20 percent below the average wage of jobs lost.
All these developments occurred when the economy was growing, worker productivity was increasing, and corporate profits reached a forty-year high. Part of the problem is that we haven’t created enough good new jobs in the decade, largely because we haven’t made an all-out commitment to a clean, efficient, independent energy future. The rest of the problem is rooted in changes in government policy and corporate conduct. We have finally raised the minimum wage for the first time in a decade,