WASHINGTON, D.C. – January 12, 2010 – As Congress works to merge the House and Senate health care reform bills, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN) has sent a letter to congressional leaders calling for the strongest final bill possible for patients.
“Families affected by cancer will benefit enormously from strong provisions in both bills that would refocus the system to better emphasize prevention, reform the private insurance market to eliminate discrimination based on health status or pre-existing conditions, and improve the quality of care patients receive,” said John R. Seffrin, Ph.D., chief executive officer of ACS CAN. “We urge Congress to take additional steps to ensure that health care is affordable and meets the needs of anyone with a life-threatening chronic disease.”
The letter from ACS CAN, the advocacy affiliate of the American Cancer Society, identifies key priorities to be addressed during the merger process, including the following:
• Improving the affordability of care through strengthened subsidies for low- and middle-income families;
• Guaranteeing the adequacy of essential benefits packages by referencing the best scientific and medical practice;
• Eliminating annual benefit limits in all insurance plans by 2014, ensuring that annual limits established before then are high enough to cover essential benefits, and banning lifetime limits altogether;
• Providing uninsured people in dire need of care immediate access to high-risk plans; and
• Promoting workplace wellness without linking insurance-based financial incentives or penalties to health outcomes beyond current regulations.
“We will not meet our goal as a nation of eliminating death and suffering related to cancer if the barriers to care are not fully addressed through comprehensive health reform,” said Molly A. Daniels, interim president of ACS CAN. “We must not waste this historic opportunity to eliminate the gaps in our broken ‘sick care’ system that leave too many families affected by cancer without critical, lifesaving care.”
The letter commends members of both the House and the Senate for the work that has already been done. ACS CAN volunteers have communicated to lawmakers with more than 100,000 calls and emails since June in support of meaningful health reform and are committed to continuing to work with lawmakers from both parties to make sure that a final bill works for cancer patients, their families and the 11 million cancer survivors in this country.
“We continue to urge lawmakers to put patients before politics and to keep the process moving toward comprehensive health care reform so we can dramatically improve the lives of all Americans,” said Robert E. Youle, a cancer survivor and volunteer chair of ACS CAN’s Board of Directors.
For more information about ACS CAN’s efforts in support of health care reform, visit https://www.fightcancer.org.
ACS CAN, the nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy affiliate of the American Cancer Society, supports evidence-based policy and legislative solutions designed to eliminate cancer as a major health problem. ACS CAN works to encourage elected officials and candidates to make cancer a top national priority. ACS CAN gives ordinary people extraordinary power to fight cancer with the training and tools they need to make their voices heard. For more information, visit www.fightcancer.org.
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