Testimony of a Cancer Survivor

I am a ten-year survivor of two kinds of cancer. I am alive because I had health insurance which permitted me to obtain excellent medical care. But if the Clinton "universal," government-mandated health care plan had been enacted in the 1990s, the odds are great that I would now be dead. If the Obama health care plan is enacted, no matter how prettied-up and carefully-worded it may be, then the nation will pay dearly and people like me will die prematurely.

That’s the whole plan. It will save Social Security and lower the average age of death to a more appropriate age.

I am sure Obama and the democrats would love to just pass a law saying we kill everyone over 65, but even they couldnt get aay with that, so they go at it through the back door.

That is correct. This goes way beyond just handing control over our healthcare to government bureaucrats.

The biotech industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, keeping thousands of researchers like me employed. Removing the incentive to do the research that leads to new therapies won’t just create unemployment among people directly involved in healthcare—it will also destroy employment in the biotech industry.

If anyone thinks that medical research won’t be affected by a government takeover of health care, they better think again. With bureaucrats denying all but the most basic treatments, there certainly is no justification for spending billions of dollars to come up with treatments for what are now intractable diseases.

Biotech and other research disciplines are doing a fine job in many areas, including new cancer therapies. The treatment I received last round (2007) didn’t exist ten years ago; it is more effective and eliminates some of the side effects. If we don’t ruin the health care system, ten years from now there will be better therapies still, not only for cancer, but for many other conditions.

Similar situation here. I had chronic renal failure over the past few years (from Polycystic Kidney Disease), ended up on dialysis in August 2007, and had a transplant in May 2008. I opted to not go on Medicare, continued to work THROUGH all of this (I was fortunate to be able to do so, but it wasn’t easy), and used the HMO plan paid for by my employer and myself to fund all of this. (Medicare kicks in after 6 months of dialysis and is in effect for the length of dialysis, and is in effect for 3 years post transplant).

In addition, I was able to compare my treatment with that of a patient in England-not even close. One of the meds they use over there is one my mother used back in the 70’s when she was on dialysis.

I’ll chime in (short version):
Last year I went from diagnosis to open-heart surgery in 10 days flat. Symptoms were minimal unto trivial, and the cardiologists were afraid I wouldn’t last thru the necessary diagnostic delays.

Thanks to our EXCELLENT health-care system, everything went fast, smooth, with nary a glitch. Recovery was quick, I feel better than ever, will last far longer than before, and need only an improved diet and one cheap pill daily. I am deeply thankful for my employer-provided private health insurance, which handled mounds of paperwork & negotiations, and even sent me a nice bouquet during recovery; my final out-of-pocket was about 2% of the house-sized price tag.

Should gov’t-managed care be thrust upon us, the same process would have involved lots of convincing of non-medical bureaucrats that shortcuts avoiding the inevitable are inappropriate; the two-part surgery most likely would have been divided futher, waiting for onset of acute symptoms before spending more later to fix what was approaching urgent now, and accepting a much lower quality of life simply because taxpayers can cough up only so much and doctors will only work for so little.

Despite the brain-dead mantra, our health care system is EXCELLENT. Don’t mess with it.

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