Obamacare and Cancer – top doctor sees no maligancy
November 12, 2013
With the Obamacare rhetoric flying, the president of the nation’s leading cancer doctors’ group says worried cancer patients may be unnecessarily concerned. He has come to the view that Obamacare will be a boon for cancer patients, and a high-profile advocate for the controversial new national health care policy.
“I think what’s true for your average cancer patient is that nothing changes,” Dr. Clifford Hudis, president of American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), told me recently. Hudis, who treats patients and is
chief of Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s breast cancer program in New York, says some of his elderly patients who are covered by Medicare have confided dark fears to him. “I’ve had my patients in my office tell me they’re scared of the Affordable Care Act because they’re so worried the government is going to get involved in their Medicare,” he said. “That misunderstanding is unfortunate.
“I’m going to see my patients. They’re going to show up in my office,” he says. “Everyone with insurance is going to see a doctor. More people are going to have insurance,” Hudis says. “The human part of me, the part that treats sick people … has a hard time getting concerned about an approach that broadens access.”
Hudis says the current system can be cruel to patients switching insurance carriers whose new insurance excludes the disease...
“Exclusion for prior diagnosis hit home for me in the last few weeks when I saw a young woman move from one good job to another good job in a different state and then develop a recurrence of breast cancer,” he said, adding that her new insurance carrier denied her coverage for a pre-existing disease. “I really thought these stories were apocryphal. But I could not arrange a biopsy of a suspicious metastatic lesion because (the condition) was excluded” from her new insurance coverage, he said...
Hudis says no society should allow insurance to be set up in a way that allows an insurer to refuse care based upon a pre-existing condition. And he credits Obamacare for eliminating exclusions based on a person’s prior medical history.
“We’re all in this together, that’s the point. This notion that only one group of people, even if it’s a large group, should be insured flies in the face of the very concept of insurance, which is to protect all of society, through share risk and burden.”
http://blogs.reuters.com/cancer-in-...care-and-cancer-top-doctor-sees-no-maligancy/