If anyone from The LA Times would like to come by Ezra Klein World Headquarters, I have a giant gold star for them:
When Rudolph W. Giuliani was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the spring of 2000, one thing he did not have to worry about was a lack of medical insurance.
Today, the former New York mayor joins two other cancer survivors in seeking the Republican presidential nomination: Arizona Sen. John McCain has been treated for melanoma, the most serious type of skin malignancy, and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson had lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system.
All three have offered proposals with the stated aim of helping the 47 million people in the U.S. who have no health insurance, including those with preexisting medical conditions.
But under the plans all three have put forward, cancer survivors such as themselves could not be sure of getting coverage -- especially if they were not already covered by a government or job-related plan and had to seek insurance as individuals.
As you folks already know, the Republican plans do very little to reform the health care system, and absolutely nothing to reform the insurance system. If you're blocked from accessing health insurance now, these plans do nothing to help you. They would, for instance, do nothing to help Susan Brown:
Susan Brown, 53, discovered her melanoma early -- a sore spot on her left shoulder smaller than a pencil eraser. She was successfully treated in 2000. But Brown, who lives in a small town in East Texas, had to give up her job as a medical office manager -- and the healthcare benefits it came with.
Since then, she said, she has been unable to find private coverage that she can afford. One company turned her down. Another wanted a letter from her cancer specialist stating that the disease would not return. Others demanded premiums that would have drained her bank account in return for policies that still would not have covered a recurrence of cancer.
The candidates "can't sit there and say they understand what people are going through, because they've got healthcare," Brown said. "We went through the same illness, however [they] don't understand what it's like not to have health insurance."
Brown remains cancer-free but uninsured. She depends on charity care for her follow-up cancer screenings, she said.
If you have cancer and can't get health insurance, the Republican solution is a tax cut. The Democratic solution is health insurance. So far as health care goes, that's the election's bottom line. What's all the more amazing is that the Republicans offering these inconsequential, insufficient plans are, themselves, cancer survivors, who routinely laud the wonderful health care they were able to access because they had health insurance. Indeed, Giuliani's post-cancer realization was that everybody should have health insurance, and that his legacy would be expanding coverage.
That was before he decided to run for president, of course. Before cruelty became more politically expedient than compassion.
