First Lady Michelle Obama took part in a White House event this afternoon to mark National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. While such events have been mostly noncontroversial in the past, Mrs. Obama used the occasion to launch an extended attack on the insurance industry, the Obama administration’s current target in the ongoing battle over national health care legislation.
After paying brief tribute to people working in the field, Mrs. Obama noted the progress that has been made in breast cancer research and treatment since former First Lady Nancy Reagan took up the cause in the early 1980s. But there is still far to go, Mrs. Obama said — and that brought her to the insurance business.
“We have a health care system in this country that simply is not working for too many people with breast cancer and too many people who are surviving with breast cancer,” Mrs. Obama said. “And I’m not just talking about women without insurance…I am talking about people in this country who have insurance who have breast cancer — folks who all too often find themselves also paying outrageous out-of-pocket costs.”
The First Lady cited a new study from the Department of Health and Human Services — which just happened to come out today — citing breast cancer patients with insurance who had to pay an average of $6,200 in out-of-pocket costs each year. “This is with insurance,” Mrs. Obama said. “These are the people who are blessed.” The situation is, of course, far worse for those without insurance, she added.
But the insurance companies make life miserable even for those with coverage. There are “those annual lifetime caps that insurance companies set,” Mrs. Obama noted, with “one recent survey show[ing] that ten percent of all cancer patients report hitting a cap on their benefits…” And then, if a patient is in remission, she is stuck “with a target on your back for the rest of your life with a ‘preexisting condition,’ which means that insurance companies can deny you coverage or charge you higher rates for coverage — sometimes much higher.”
Put it together, and it means “women are denied insurance” and are “paying very high premiums for their coverage” under insurance policies that “won’t even cover treatment if she has a recurrence.” The result is that women are “living in fear of losing their jobs or changing jobs or even moving, because they worry they won’t be able to find affordable insurance.”
That brought the First Lady to the pitch for Democratic health care legislation currently under consideration on Capitol Hill. “This is not acceptable,” she said. “That’s why it is so critically important that we finally reform our health care system that is causing so much heartache for so many people affected by this disease. Now is the time. Fortunately, that’s exactly what the plans being considered by Congress right now would do.”
There was still more. “So just to be clear,” Mrs. Obama said, “under these plans, if you already have insurance that works for you, then you’re all set. You can keep your insurance and you can keep your doctors.” She continued:
The plans put in place some basic rules of the road to protect you from abuses and unfair practices by insurance companies. That would mean no more denying coverage to people like women we heard from today because of so-called preexisting conditions like having survived cancer. Because there’s a belief that if you’ve already fought cancer, you shouldn’t have to also fight with insurance companies to get the coverage that you need at a price that you can afford.
These plans mean insurance companies will no longer be allowed to cap the amount of coverage that you can get, and will limit how much insurance companies can charge you for out-of-pocket expenses, because in this country, getting sick shouldn’t mean going bankrupt.
And finally, these plans will require insurance companies to cover basic preventative care — from routine checkups, to mammograms, to pap smears — at no extra charge to you…So that’s how health insurance reform will work. That’s how it will help people who have been diagnosed with breast cancer and those who’ve survived the disease. But first, we have to get it passed. First we have to get it passed.
And so it went. The First Lady concluded with the hope that daughters and granddaughters of the future will not have to face mammograms and other tests without health care reform. Life will be better for them, she concluded, “because of all the strides that we’ve made and the work that we’ve done for this cure and for this reform.”
