Published
July 07, 2026
Heart disease has been the leading cause of death in the United States for over a century. It still is. But what it means to receive a serious cardiovascular diagnosis has changed so profoundly over the past five decades that the disease itself is almost unrecognizable compared to what it was in 1970.
That year, age-adjusted heart attack mortality stood at 354 deaths per 100,000 Americans. By 2022, it had fallen to 40. That 89% decline came from a sustained wave of breakthroughs: coronary care units, bypass surgery, artery-opening stents, and eventually statin-based lipid-lowering therapy, which GIPC's Estimating the Full Value of Medical Innovation identifies as the cornerstone of modern cardiovascular prevention. Randomized trials have shown statins reduce deaths and major cardiovascular events by roughly 20% to 30%, adding close to a year of life per patient on average. Multiplied across tens of millions of Americans, that’s an almost incomprehensible amount of restored time.
The report estimates heart disease innovation generated $13.7 trillion in health value over 30 years. Behind that figure are workers who stayed healthy through their most productive years, parents present for milestones they might otherwise have missed, older adults who got more time living independently. The report acknowledges its formal estimates focus on life expectancy and don't capture quality-of-life improvements, meaning the full human benefit is likely larger still.
The economic picture has its own surprises. Unlike some disease areas where new therapies increased net spending, cardiovascular innovation actually reduced health care costs overall, while generating $1.11 trillion in productivity gains and roughly $103 billion in additional federal tax revenue over 30 years.
What made all of this possible was a system built on strong intellectual property protections, sustained private R&D investment, and market incentives that reward the long, uncertain work of developing new therapies. Proposals like Most-Favored Nation pricing would erode those incentives; research suggests MFN-style pricing could cut U.S. life sciences R&D spending by nearly 19% and clinical trial activity by as much as 75%.
Heart disease remains the nation's leading killer, and the next frontier — heart failure, arrhythmias, hypertensive heart disease — has proven harder to crack. Mortality from those conditions has actually risen even as heart attack deaths plummeted. That 89% decline took generations of researchers and a policy environment that rewarded risk. Undermining it now would put a hard-won trajectory in jeopardy.
About the author
Brad Watts
Brad Watts is the Senior Vice President at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC). He works with U.S. Chamber members to foster a political, legal, and economic environment where innovators and creators can invest in the next big thing for the benefit of Americans and the world.
