Who Ya Gonna Call For Delayed Cancer Surgery?

Letter to Philippians: Cancer treatment delays are surging across US as “doctor warns system needs fixing immediately.” Can you imagine what those medical delays would look like if today’s left gets its Medicare for All plan enacted? Maybe worse? Maybe not?

Consider the WSJ coverage of a recent study published in JAMA Surgery which showed: “Wait times between a cancer diagnosis & the start of treatment grew by nearly two weeks over the past decade in the US.” The researchers from the University of California & Massachusetts General Hospital had analyzed national data from over TWO MILLION PATIENTS diagnosed between 2012 & 2023. They tracked adults with early to advanced stages of six common cancers. And the conclusion was alarming. Median wait times grew by more than 10 days, regardless of whether surgery came first or followed other treatments. Breast cancer wait times, for example, grew from 34 to 45 days, while colon cancer delays increased from 20 to 31 days. The delays were even seen at high-volume academic medical centers, said Dr. Marc Siegel, Fox News analyst. But, if wait times in the US were increasing by as much as 25% across the board, even longer “wait times were seen for Black patients, people on Medicaid, individuals in lower-income areas … and those treated at academic medical centers or high-volume hospitals.” Naturally, the study’s authors also noted that delays in surgical treatment have been tied to higher death & worse long-term survival rates.

Would a universal coverage system that replaces the existing private health insurance model ameliorate or exacerbate these wait times? And at what cost? That’s the Trillion Dollar Question(s) now being debated. The CBO says a single-payer system would likely introduce new bottlenecks triggered by 27M uninsured Americans swelling demand, lower payouts to hospitals & specialists who are forced to close or leave their practices, and fiscal constraints on new technologies like MRIs. Advocates of such a Canadian-style aka government-run insurance model insist it would more efficiently “level the playing field” & reduce surgical wait times by eliminating current private insurance company hurdles. Meanwhile …

Davd Soul