What are the Odds?

There was a lot of excitement this past week over the Mega Millions lottery drawing with a payout of over half a billion dollars. There were people throwing out a dollar or two that have never bought tickets before. I even read a story this morning about someone that bought 2600 tickets just so they could increase their odds of winning. With the odds of winning at over 175 million to 1 it is truly a long shot if you do win. Personally I don’t think it matters if you buy one ticket or a million the only way you are going to win is if it is your turn to win and fate points its finger at you. I am not a regular player, but I bought a couple of tickets just in case it was my turn to win. Obviously the odds were not in my favor since I didn’t win. When it comes to the chance of winning millions people do not really pay attention to the odds. They get caught up in the excitement and the chance of being financially set for life and ignore their odds of winning. People don’t mind playing the odds when there is a big payout.

We are all players in the game of life and it is truly a game of numbers. We all play the odds every day. When most of us think of playing a game and being against the odds though we all like to look at the brighter things in life, like winning the lottery. But there is a numbers game that each and every one of us plays throughout our life where our chances are greater than 175 million to 1 and you play without ever buying the first ticket. If you are a male did you know that of all the different types of cancer that people could possibly have, your odds of developing one type is 1 in 2. Your odds of dying from cancer are 1 in 4. If you are a female your odds are a little greater with your chances of developing cancer at 1 in 3 and chances of dying from it at 1 in 5. 

So let’s break it down using just the male numbers for the sake of simplicity and give you a good visual perspective of what those odds look like. Let’s say you live in on a street with three other families. Each family has four people living in their house, so you have 16 people total living on your street. Of those 16 the odds are that 2 people in every household will develop some kind of cancer in their lifetime. Of those 8 on your street that develop cancer the odds are that 2 will die from their disease. Now there are a lot of factors that change those odds. For simplicity we base the odds on all types of cancer and we would have to assume that everyone had the same type of cancer. The odds change with every different type of cancer that people can get, but even so look at the chances you have of developing cancer of any kind.  

When it comes to cancer, no one wants to buy a ticket to play. We would much rather shell out a few dollars playing the long odds at winning the lottery. But if we look at the odds, you are more likely to get cancer than to win half a billion dollars in a lottery. So why don’t we spend our money to decrease the odds of developing something we don’t want rather than throwing it away on something we do want, but have very little chance of getting. The cure for cancer is not going to miraculously appear out of the blue. The only way to find the cure is through research and research costs money. In 2010 an estimated 5.8 billion dollars was spent on cancer research in the U.S. By comparison in that same year North Carolinians spent 1.45 billion on lottery tickets. If that number is average for all 43 states that have lotteries then Americans spent somewhere around 62 billion dollars on chances at becoming millionaires. So think of what 62 billion dollars spent on cancer research could do. That is 10 years’ worth of funding! 

So pull a dollar out of your pocket and take a long look at it and decide which game of odds you really want to play it on, a 1 in 175 million chance of becoming a millionaire, or a chance at increasing the odds of not developing cancer in your lifetime. Just remember, millionaires can get cancer too. What good would all that money be if you have a 1 in 2 chance of developing a disease that you have a 1 in 4 chance of dying from.