Cancer awareness blogs

What healthcare reform means for cancer patients

By Sheryl
March 29, 2010

It’s no secret that lifestyle habits like diet and smoking can increase or decrease our risk of cancer. Genetics are also a major player in the development of the disease. Now, there’s something else that might be able to influence the number of lives affected by cancer.

It’s the passage of the new healthcare legislation. Now, before you throw your hands up in disgust at yet another discussion of healthcare reform, keep your fingers on your mouse and think about this perspective.

Cancer is an extremely expensive disease for both the patient and their insurance company. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories or maybe even know someone personally who has been dropped from their plan or denied health insurance because of a cancer diagnosis. As a cancer survivor, it’s so very frustrating and difficult for me know that there are people out there who are so desperately in need of care and so unable to receive it.

I believe that no one should have to delay or forgo cancer treatment. It’s a twisted irony that there is help and hope available, yet oftentimes, it’s totally untouchable.

I write about health, but not healthcare policy. Yet it’s difficult not to pay at least a little attention to what’s been going on in this country in the past few years and the effort to put us on firm footing as it relates to the ability to pay for fair and decent healthcare. And it’s even more difficult is to sort it all out. But what’s heartening and understandable is this: Agree with it or not, last week’s historic vote means changes are at least taking place.

In a perfect world, access to healthcare will be improved by making insurance coverage affordable to most everyone. Discrimination will be eliminated because no one would ever again be told they are too sick, their treatment too costly, their needs met too late, their condition a pre-existing one.

People will have the benefit of prevention and early detection because their insurance plans will cover essential, evidence-based measures, with additional co-pays eliminated. The wide disparity in treatment and deaths among low-income and minority populations will be narrowed with the expansion of Medicaid and tax subsidies.

There would be fewer children who have to face losing a parent, fewer parents tragically coping with the death of a child, fewer people suffering the loss of their own lives.

It’ll never be a perfect world, but maybe, hopefully, with some necessary and long-overdue changes in healthcare reform, we can benefit from a system that’s a bit closer to perfect.

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