Dealing With Cancer

People are very skeptical of politicians these days, and I don’t blame them. Between “Read My Lips, No New Taxes,” “Mission Accomplished,” “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” and “I Was Just Trying To Be A Good Mentor To Those Pages,” it has become hard for the public to know who to believe.

That is why I plan to spend a lot of time during my campaign talking about real, concrete things that I have already done during my relatively short career in politics. I think that people take your campaign promises a lot more seriously when you can point to a record of accomplishment. Today’s New York Times points out the importance of the work I am very proud to have done on cancer care for the uninsured in Delaware.

Today’s Times points out that cancer care for the uninsured has become such a problem that the American Cancer Society is dedicating its entire advertising budget for the year to highlighting it. You can read the article here. Well, Delaware has been way out in front of the nation in addressing this problem. Back in March of 2001, the Delaware Advisory Council on Cancer Incidence and Mortality was formed. I was a member of the council. When we issued our report in April, 2002, one of our most prominent recommendations was for Delaware to become the first state in America to pay for cancer treatment for the uninsured. The reason was simple: there are plenty of statistics showing that the quality of care for cancer patients with insurance is superior to treatment for those without.

We didn’t just stop with the report, we lobbied the Governor and General Assembly to implement and fund its recommendations. In 2003, our efforts paid off: the Governor and General Assembly implemented our recommendation by funding cancer treatment for any uninsured Delawareans who are at or below 650% of the federal poverty level—about $130,000/year for a family of four.

There is still an awful lot of work to be done. As the Times noted today, cancer detection—which is key to keeping mortality rates down—is directly related to whether people have health insurance. Uninsured breast cancer patients, for example, are twice as likely to have their cancer diagnosed in a late stage (when it is much harder to treat) as those who have insurance. So the ultimate goal must be to get people insured. And there is also a lot more to do in investigating the environmental causes of cancer. All that said, the Cancer Consortium’s program to treat uninsured cancer victims is groundbreaking. And so are some of our other recommendations that were implemented, including the indoor smoking ban, a high-profile colorectal cancer screening program, and the creation of a top-rate “patient navigator” program to assist cancer victims in getting the best possible treatment.

I am proud of the work that I did with the Cancer Consortium, not just in coming up with its recommendations but in being a leader in the effort to get them implemented. It is something I am going to talk about during the campaign, so that when I talk about my agenda as Lt. Governor, people will know that they can take what I say to the bank.