Op-Ed: Childhood Cancer Survivors Underscore The Need To Ban Pre-existing Conditions

Op-Ed

September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. This year, in the middle of our national debate over health care reform, it is especially important to be aware of the more than American 12,000 children under 14 years who are diagnosed with cancer each year. One of the immediate benefits of passing health care legislation will be the elimination of the insurance industry practice of rejecting customers for "pre-existing conditions." Due to advances in medical research and treatment, the five-year survivor rate for children with cancer has improved from 56% in 1974 to nearly 80% today. Among these, there are the lucky few who mature into adulthood cancer-free, but two-thirds of the survivors experience relapses or other late effects of the disease. For more than a quarter, these late effects are very serious.

But the one thing every cancer survivor has in common -- young or old, fully recovered or still fighting -- is that they are forever saddled with "pre-existing conditions". It is imperative that we ban the practice of denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions, but even that is not enough. Without a low cost, widely available alternative to private insurance, companies forced to accept customers with previous illnesses will just make their coverage too expensive for the higher-risk patients to afford.

Earlier this year, I introduced the Childhood Cancer Survivorship Research and Quality of Life Act. This would increase access to childhood cancer clinics, make long-term follow-up services more readily available, and establish research grants to better understand childhood cancer and the long term side effects associated with it. As important as this bill is, and I expect it to get a hearing in the near future, nothing is more fundamental to caring for survivors of childhood cancer than passing a health care reform bill that, once and for all, bans insurance companies' policy of denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and makes healthcare coverage available to all Americans, regardless of medical history or other factors.

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