Lori Falce: The unreachable cure for cancer

There might be no better way to get people on your side than to say you want to cure cancer.

Cancer is an ugly, predatory beast that stalks its victims without regard for age or class or worthiness. It attacks the good and the evil dispassionately.

In 2019, the most recent date with complete statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 1.7 million new cases were reported. Almost 600,000 people died. About 1 in 6 deaths is cancer-related, making it all but a statistical impossibility for anybody to not be touched by cancer somehow. Maybe you didn’t have it, but someone you know did.

And so when President Joe Biden stood at the John F. Kennedy Library and pushed for a cancer cure with the same fervor Kennedy used for his moonshot, it was something that could appeal to people regardless of politics. No one is pro-cancer.

On the television show “The West Wing,” fictional president Jed Bartlett made the same push. It was probably for the same reasons. Ideally, to give his television constituency hope at a time when that lagged. Cynically, because the character’s poll numbers were low.

The problem with Biden’s challenge to develop “bold, ambitious and, I might add, completely doable” treatments and therapeutics to do battle against this deadly foe is that it ignores the most staggering impediment to fighting cancer: the ability to obtain those treatments and therapeutics.

More Americans have access to health care than at any time in our history. With the Affordable Care Act, with more than 35 million people with health insurance, it would seem anyone who needed to be tested for cancer, monitored for cancer, treated for cancer, to have cancer cut out of the body or to take medication to fight cancer would be able to do that.

That simply isn’t true.

To have insurance is different from being able to afford to use your insurance. Maybe your insurance seems like a good plan when you don’t need it. But when you go to pick up your asthma inhaler and it costs $500 because your plan year just started and you haven’t met your deductible, it doesn’t really feel like you have insurance.

Cancer is a disease where being caught early is ideal. That means regular doctor’s appointments when you are well. But many Americans put off visits even when they are sick for the simple reason that navigating insurance is like taking the bar exam, and high-deductible plans can lead to crippling choices.

How many parents put off their own appointments or medications to make sure they can pay for their children’s insulin? I’ve made that choice myself with my son’s ADHD medication.

It doesn’t matter if we cure cancer if we can’t afford the cure. That should be addressed first because it should be the easier fix — the rocket ship that gets you there and back safely. Without it, we are left to just stare at a cure glittering in front of us in the darkness, just out of reach.