Opinion: Smoking or healthcare? Pick your carcinogen
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Michael Moore crusading against the machinations of the healthcare industry is one thing. But when the American Cancer Society takes up arms against low-quality healthcare with a $15 million campaign, it looks like the beginning of a good long siege.
Normally the organization devotes its campaigns to the dangers of cigarettes or the benefits of regular cancer screenings. But after crunching the numbers, CEO John Seffrin told NPR, it was clear that
Lack of access to timely and adequate healthcare has now become a major cause of cancer deaths in America. We were advertising to get people in to do the colonoscopy ... or to stop smoking, and the truth is that many people said, we couldn’t get in to get it done, or it cost too much, or I couldn’t afford it, or my insurance didn’t cover it. So we began looking into it and sure enough — more than race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, education — it’s whether you’re covered with insurance that most correlates to excess cancer mortality in America.
Seffrin said he hopes that the effort will motivate all presidential candidates to come out with platforms on healthcare. He’s probably halfway to that goal — many of the major candidates have produced some vision for affordable universal coverage, and HillaryCare 2.0 is generating respectable buzz.
If candidates are already touting their positions on healthcare, what does the cancer society’s pitch have over them? Simple: It’s not a candidate. It has little political capital to gain from using the problem as an election ’08 hot topic. Chiming in to the national dialogue on healthcare adds both value and urgency — and in the midst of campaign frenzy, provides a stark reminder of what’s truly at stake.