Cancer and the Campaign

“If it weren’t for your dad,” my mother told me recently, “I would probably be indigent.” She was confiding in me about the steep costs of her treatment for metastatic breast cancer, and I smiled at first because it sounded like a joke. After all, I grew up in a comfortable middle-class household with two working parents.

But my mom has continued to complain about this problem—as have several of the presidential contenders in speeches around the country lately, in more general terms—and I have come to realize that the costliness of cancer is no joke even to comfortable families.

My dad guesses that my mother’s care has cost roughly $100,000 a year since she was diagnosed two-and-a-half years ago. Without the health insurance he gets through his job, her treatment might have forced my parents to sell their home in Iowa City’s tiny but proud historical district.

Fortunately my dad is a workaholic who shuns retirement at the age of 68. Next month my mom turns 65, so she will be an official retiree, rewarded for a lifetime of nursing with a pension and the benefits of Medicare.

But listening to the politicians when I was home leading up to the Iowa caucuses earlier this month reminded me that not everyone is so “lucky.”

In one speech, Hillary Clinton talked about a nurse from Waterloo, Iowa, she’d met who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. “The treatment made her really sick,” Clinton said. “She couldn’t go to work. By the time she got back to work, she found out she didn’t have a job anymore. When she lost her job, she lost her health care.”

Even my dad—not a Hillary fan—agreed she was shedding light on a situation that is devastating for many women who need the same treatments as my mom.

John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, who has metastatic breast cancer, argued for universal health care at an Iowa City coffee shop: “We have good health insurance,” he said. “But what does somebody do who doesn’t have health insurance? You can’t go to the emergency room for chemotherapy.”

But it’s Hillary who stole my vote with her ability to see what lies ahead—pointing out that baby boomers’ own health expenses are growing just as the costs of caring for their aging parents skyrocket too.

I’m not a baby boomer and I’m not a proper caregiver, but I am paying for frequent trips back to Iowa to be with my mom the same year that I am paying back student loans for the first time in my life. And in order to be closer to my mom, I did turn down a steady job at a financial news service in Europe. (I would have been paid in euros!)

Spending time with my mother has no price tag. But I wonder what I and my family would have done if there was no insurance. My dad says the insurance company “has been good to us.” But he laments the power of drug companies, and what he sees as doctors’ inflated salaries, for the hefty price tag of my mom’s care. Whatever her or his politics, I hope that the next President includes cancer on the “Change” agenda that all the candidates seem to endorse—so that everyone unlucky enough to need cancer treatments is lucky enough to get them.