Alternatives to Trump’s Wall – Medicine

It’s been less than a month, but Donald Trump has already begun making good (or not) on his main campaign pledge. In case you were living in isolation for the whole of 2016, his pledge was of course to “build a wall” between Mexico and the United States. But how much will it cost – and could the money be better spent elsewhere?

Mismatched figures

The 45^th president himself has been quoted as saying the wall will cost $10 billion. But as we’ve come to expect of Mr Trump, this figure isn’t entirely accurate. According to construction consultants Gleeds Worldwide, the real cost of the wall will be closer to $31 billion, partly down to extra costs of labour, machinery and transport.

Speaking to the Guardian, Gleeds chairman Richard Steer said “You’ve got to build roads to move the materials and machinery and get the workforce to the location as the wall is being built… You would need a very big labour force to build it – some 40,000 people working over five years”

Medicine costs

One of Trump’s other campaign policies has been a complete opposition to Obama’s health insurance reforms. Since coming into office, he has already put the wheels in motion to dismantle so-called Obamacare. But what if he put his hefty wall budget into healthcare?

The money could simply be used to build hospitals. Opened in 2015, he Banner Fort Collins Medical Center cost $86 million to build. It is one of the newer hospitals in America and has 22 patient beds and three operating rooms. Trump’s wall fund could build about 360 similar hospitals.

Alternatively, it could go towards cancer care. Figures from the National Institutes of Health estimate that the total annual cost of caring for and treating US breast cancer patients was $16.5 billion. Prostate cancer comes to approximately $12 billion. Based on this, Trump could save millions of lives instead of his wall.

Funding research

But what about medical research? According to Forbes it costs an average of $1.3 billion to bring a new drug to market. That would mean Trump could swap his wall on the southern border for roughly 24 fully developed drugs. That’s funding for 24 medications that could not only save lives, but could save money in the long run.

A UK study of US healthcare found that a clinical trial costing $10.5 million actually generated a saving of $2,816 million for society. And with exciting developments in cancer treatment providing new ways to tackle the disease – like the fast-developing field of nanomedicine – it seems now is the time to be investing in research, rather than walls.