The United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year fighting cardiovascular disease.15 But if we could stop all cardiovascular disease—every single case, all at once—we wouldn’t add many years to the average lifespan; the gain would be just 1.5 years. The same is true for cancer; stopping all forms of that scourge would give us just 2.1 more years of life on average, because all other causes of death still increase exponentially.
