"He has insurance."

[Promoted by MB.]

"He has insurance", Tony Snow is lucky.  In the United States, having insurance is really all that matters. The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee healthcare as a basic right of citizenship.

So we hold our breath and ask the fateful question whenever someone we know receives an awful diagnosis, "are you insured?"

There were a bunch of Tony Snow diaries recently. Now I'll add mine to the growing body of literature on high profile Republicans who get struck down by cancer.  

Wishing Tony Snow well is easy. Of course we hope he will make a full recovery. But I'd like to see Tony Snow defy his president and his Fox News Republican Party and show some leadership. Anyone think Tony Snow will discuss from the White House podium the plight of 48 million uninsured Americans?  And even more heartbreaking, those Americans with cancer and without insurance?

The Tony Snow story, for me at least, turns on these three words: "He has insurance". This is what Dana Perino, the acting White House Press Secretary said in the White House briefing room.

Snow is ensured the best treatment, at a hospital he wished not to disclose. "Tony Snow is paid the salary that he's paid, and he has health insurance," said Dana Perino, filling in for him at the White House. "And I'm sure he's taken care of that way."

http://www.courierpress.com/...

I'm sure he will be well taken care of, Dana.

Equally discouraging is the fact that as far as I can ascertain, the pathetic administration scribes known as the White House press corps, failed to move the story one inch beyond Tony Snow.

The reality of a cancer diagnosis for millions of Americans even those of us privileged to have insurance is often a ticket to bankruptcy and Murder by Spreadsheet.

Pharmacy: Cancer care can leave bankrupt

If you come down with cancer, you had better have health insurance. Otherwise, prepare to go bankrupt or die.

Cancer treatment has become so expensive that unless you are very rich or very poor, well-insured or covered by Medicare, you will miss out on the latest breakthroughs. Anyone who is middle class and uninsured is in big trouble.

The Food and Drug Administration just approved a new drug for breast cancer. Tykerb is an exciting advance because it improves survival in women with aggressive tumors that no longer respond to standard treatments.

The trouble with Tykerb is that it costs about $2,900 per month and has to be given with another medicine called Xeloda that can run more than $1,500 a month.

http://www.chron.com/...

I hope Tony Snow gets all the chemotherapy he needs. Then I hope when he returns to the White House, he'll reveal what if anything, he had to pay for and what was paid for by his Rolls Royce Federal Employees Health Care. This is the  health care which is awarded to all our elected officials and government employees but denied to the American people.

Could anyone point me to a story relating to an elected official--any elected official--who has had to sell his or her home to pay for chemotherapy?

The only way to pay for such treatment is to sell your home. Even then you might only be able to afford a few years' treatment. Ultimately, families go deeply into debt or give up.

Even with insurance, a 20 percent co-pay could represent a bill of thousands of dollars a year. Few families can come up with that kind of cash, especially if the patient is the breadwinner.

Insurance companies are no happier about these bills than patients. As a result, some insurers are unlikely to cover treatments that are considered experimental.

http://www.chron.com/...

I was going to call this diary something very inappropriate like, Republicans get cancer too, because that's how I was feeling at the time.  But I thought better than to toy with the tragic healthcare situation in the United States. Perhaps the White House press corps might use this terrible turn of events for Tony Snow and turn it into something positive for the American people. They might even ask Mr. Snow when he returns about the cuts Mr. Bush has proposed for cancer research.

In President Bush's proposed 2007 budget, the annual budget for the National Cancer Institute would be cut 0.8% ($39.5 million) to $4.75 billion. This would come a year after a $31 million cut in the NCI's budget, and it would mark the first consecutive years of decreased funding since 1981 and '82, the institute says.
http://www.usatoday.com/...

And for the rest of us, especially those of us who are self-employed, the health insurance situation becomes more dire with every passing day.  In California, it can't get much worse.

A major source of health insurance for people who work for themselves is disappearing, casting thousands of contractors, freelancers and solo practitioners into the ranks of the uninsured with little hope of obtaining new coverage.

Health plans offered by professional associations were once havens for millions of people who couldn't get coverage anywhere else. But as medical costs have soared, groups representing professions as varied as law and golf have been forced to stop offering the benefit or been dropped by insurers.

More than 8,000 people with coverage through the California Assn. of Realtors could be next if Blue Shield of California succeeds with its plan to cancel the group's health coverage.

"It's a real stab in the heart," said Marcy Garber, 62, an Encino real estate agent whose history of breast cancer makes her an almost-certain reject if she seeks similar coverage on her own.

http://www.latimes.com/...

Yes indeed the diagnosis is the first sucker punch to the stomach. But from what many survivors tell you, that's only the tip of the iceberg.  Because here in America, if you're not rich, or powerful, or connected, you're in big trouble with such an awful medical problem.

Healthcare is not your right in America, the richest country on the planet.