The Giving Pledge – what impact on global health?

I’ve been spending some time reading the pledges rolling in for Gates’ and Buffet’s Giving Pledge – the movement to inspire global billionaires to give away 50% or more of their wealth.  I’m curious to know what impact this pledge could have on health research and treatment.  Here are some excerpts from pledges that give a clue:

• Eli & Edyth Broad:  While we spend the most time on education reform, we invest the greatest resources in scientific and medical research, primarily in the areas of human genomics, stem cell research and inflammatory bowel disease.  It is our hope that through our investments in these areas and our creation of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the scientific and medical research we are funding will ultimately improve the human condition.
  
• Michele Chan & Patrick Soon-Shiong:  Growing up in South Africa during the time of apartheid, we had direct experience of inequality, including great disparities in health and access to good care. After thirty years living in the United States, we see similar disparities in health care on our doorstep in Los Angeles, and across the nation. What was unconscionable to us in South Africa in the twentieth century is just as unconscionable in the United States in the twenty-first.
  
• John & Karen Huntsman: My pledge to give my entire fortune to curing cancer and assisting related other charities was formalized decades ago. As my sweet mother took her last breath in my arms and succumbed to the cancer she could no longer fight, I realized that our humanitarian focus must center on cancer. I saw with clarity the vision that the Huntsman fortune is a means to cure cancer and that my purpose on earth is to facilitate the research which will illuminate its mysteries.
  
• Ronald O. Perelman:  I have always been interested in giving to projects that may not get done otherwise. If the research wasn’t productive, I would have spent money to no avail, but, if the idea worked, the potential was enormous—it was a risk I was willing to take.  I asked Dr. Slamon what he needed and then told him to get to work.  The result of that research was Herceptin, the only drug known to cure certain types of breast cancer.  And it started helping women, like that woman’s sister whom I will probably never meet, a full 10 years earlier than if Dr. Slamon had not received my gift.
  
• Sanford & Joan Weill: Among some of our proudest moments in philanthropy to date include: opening up the first American medical school overseas in Qatar in 2001 following the tragic events of 9/11 and at a time when many questioned doing something in the Middle East, as well as aiding in the development of a medical school in Tanzania and an HIV/AIDS clinic in Haiti…