Social security expenditures keep rising endlessly as the aging of Japan's population accelerates with the low birthrate. Yet, little is known about the way huge sums of taxpayer money are being poured into wasteful projects tied to vested interests in the name of saving human lives.
The Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED), which Prime Minister Shinzo Abe created with much fanfare in 2015 as a counterpart to the U.S. National Institute of Health, has an annual budget in excess of ¥140 billion. But the National Cancer Center (NCC), which is supposed to be a major recipient of the AMED fund, is in trouble because excessive sums have been spent on construction of buildings and facilities in the name of life science research.
A glance at the NCC's financial statements shows that its retained earnings plummeted from ¥5.6 billion in fiscal 2010 to ¥762 million in 2015. The steep fall in the retained earnings is not due to cuts in grants from the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry, as a high-ranking NCC official claims. The NCC earned ¥31.4 billion from medical services and ¥4.3 billion from research projects in fiscal 2010, and these earnings rose by 41 percent to ¥44.4 billion and 14 percent to ¥9.2 billion, respectively, unequivocally showing that the rise in earnings far exceeded the cut in government grants.