Can't Afford to Live

Richard Gregory
2/6/09
4:59 PM

Cancer used to end in death but now people can fight against cancer, but only if you have enough money. John Seffrin of the American Cancer Society states “it is a big surprise that 20 percent of people with health insurance can’t afford to have the cancer therapy they need to save their lives.” This topic came into focus when Ruth Bader Ginsburg had to get treated for pancreatic cancer which is very rare, very deadly and also very expensive to treat. The cost of someone with leukemia which is actually cancer in the blood and bones cost about 1 million dollars to treat for the rest of that person’s life. Jamie Drzewicki has breast cancer and only a 100,000 dollar health insurance policy, so now she has to come up with about 900,000 more dollars. Some doctors and scientists say that we could actually get rid of cancer as a large public health issue but the therapy and treatments are too expensive.

This is definitely a large problem in our society considering that cancer can and often leads to death. We are also in a recession so money is already tighter than usual while health bills for cancer are going up. How can the treatments we need to stay alive go up while the money we receive from our jobs goes down? Hopefully insurance ends up giving cancer patients more money towards the cancer patient’s treatments and therapy. Not just cancer being too expensive but I was also watching a documentary called “Sicko” yesterday and it showed how horrible our healthcare system is. A lot of people can’t afford basic healthcare and we’re supposed to be the greatest nation on earth. I don’t know who it’s up to to change the healthcare system but we need to make a change if people are dying just because they can’t afford to live.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/02/05/cancer.spending/index.html