The Dallas Morning News
By Connie Mabin
3/26/2002
Despite earlier promises of coverage, state lawmakers have failed to ensure funding for a program that provides breast and cervical cancer treatment for hundreds of uninsured women.
Last year, Texas lawmakers approved the state program authorized by the federal Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention and Treatment Act of 2000.
The law allows Texas to use state and federal Medicaid money to provide free medical care to uninsured women who are found to have breast or cervical cancer but who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. About 200 women per year were estimated to be eligible.
But in the final, hectic days of the last Legislature, budget writers quietly placed the $1.2 million program on a list of items to be funded in the $114 billion budget only if extra money could be found during the 2002-03 budget cycle.
Six months into that cycle, Comptroller Carole Keeton Rylander can’t find the money.
Comment: This may be April Fools’ Day, a day for humorous pranks, but this is perhaps the cruelest prank ever perpetrated by legislators. Funds have been provided to screen for breast and cervical cancer for low-income, uninsured women who are not eligible for other programs. But now, after their cancers are diagnosed, they are told that they are on their own. Only in America do we accept a method of funding health care that is capable of inflicting profoundly cruel and inhumane anguish.
Fortunately, in this instance the numbers of individuals involved are small enough, and there is enough altruism within the health care delivery system that most of these individuals will gain access to care. But, instead of putting these unfortunate individuals through a transitional period of terror that they may not have access to care, shouldn’t it be a matter of routine policy that access is automatic? And what about the tens of millions of other unmet medical needs that altruism alone cannot fund? Shouldn’t it be a matter of routine policy that these needs be automatically addressed by our health care delivery system?
We really do need a publicly administered and equitably funded program of comprehensive health benefits for everyone. What are we waiting for?