Will Cancer Treatment Benefit from Health Care Reform?
I find it both surprising and disappointing that cancer treatment is not more of a factor in the health care reform debate. Most people would agree that cancer is the greatest health care issue we face in this country. We have officially declared a war against it! Yet, we hear almost no debate about how our most difficult disease to treat is addressed in the 2000 page health care reform bill.
I have several questions that I have not found answers to in the bill. Will all types of cancers receive equal priority for coverage? Will there be a cap on treatment costs? Will different treatments be encouraged or discouraged based on their historical effectiveness? Will the costs of various therapies be controlled? Will government provided and private insurances be required to pay for certain complementary therapies? Will there be incentives for research and development of natural, non-toxic complements to conventional treatment.
My guess is that cancer treatment is virtually absent from the bill. Any application to cancer treatment will be determined by government agencies after passage. This would be in keeping with the attention the government has paid to cancer treatment in general and integrative oncology in particular for years. If the bill passes, regardless of its public option status, I predict that cancer treatment in America will continue its quagmire of the status quo.
There is one area being debated that I am somewhat hopeful about. If private health insurance companies are forced to begin making their coverage available nationwide, they will, for the first time, have to compete with many more companies than in the past. They will no longer be able to control their market within the confines of their state. This would open up a much more robust competition among all of the companies. Perhaps more companies will be willing to cover more complementary therapies in an attempt to gain market share. I believe that, if one or two companies announced that they would cover a wide array of complementary therapies, they would almost monopolize the market for a period of time. Soon, other companies would have to follow suit to stay competitive. What a giant leap forward that would be for integrative oncology.