Opinion : Anti- Cancer Plan

For the election this year, Lance Armstrong called on candidates to have a plan to fight cancer. Despite the fact that cancer deaths are generally decreasing across the board, it is still a major problem, and I applaud him for bringing attention to it. However the only candidate to immediately come up with a plan was John Edwards, and this makes me sad. On the continuing theme that I could run this country better than John Edwards, here is the Chris Gange plan to fight cancer:

Prevention: the first step has to be prevention, as most cancer deaths are still from preventable causes.

- I would dramatically increase the amount of anti-smoking advertising and also raise taxes on cigarettes to help offset increasing health care costs.

- I would create a program to provide financial incentives for people to get cancer screenings, especially breast cancer, colon cancer, and prostate cancer. I believe that providing a small amount of payment would be very effective as it would save money in the long run, and also it would provide more incentive to lower income people who are more susceptible to not catching cancer in time.

- I would direct research money to practical applications, such as finding out why people are not getting annual screenings and attempting to remedy those problems with creative solutions. For instance if women find mammograms uncomfortable, I would have engineers determine ways to make the machines more user friendly. This type of research is likely to be far more cost effective in lives saved then the very basic cancer research that gets the vast majority of money now.

- I would also direct research money to finding more chemicals that are partial carcinogens, so that they can be regulated. While large companies lobby against this type of research, I believe that there are several target compounds worth researching, such as phthalates, and aromatic compounds. An independent advisory board would need to be set up to insure that lobbyists do not have influence overthe funding or reporting of this type of research.

- I would increase funding for HPV and hepatitis vaccines.


Education: the public needs to be better educated about the causes and ways to prevent cancer. This goes a long way with prevention.

- I would create a program to provide free counseling to people who are concerned that they may be at risk. There should also be computer models and public health interventions that find and target people with high risk and notify them of this.

- I would create a website and a hotline that would act as a clearinghouse of information on what causes cancer and the treatment and prevention options. This website needs to be user friendly and understandable by average people, however it must speak with the authority of government scientists and physicians and can't be influenced by independent, for-profit parties.

- I would create advertising campaign to educate people about common symptoms that may be associated with cancer so that they know to not ignore symptoms and go to a doctor before the problem gets out of control.


Treatment:

- Organize cancer treatment centers into local centers of excellence and centralize all cancer care at these centers. This would mimic the way that cystic fibrosis and some other more rare diseases are treated. While this would be a near impossible task with our current fragmented and competing healthcare system, this would yield significantly better outcomes, as repeated studies show that higher case volume improves individual patient outcomes. This would also allow for more specialization in the field of oncology and would make it much easier to compare outcomes across different geographic regions. Quality control stats would be made public and hold the centers accountable.

- Develop a protocol to provide palliative care for terminal patients, and fund research into this area.

- Create a database to track all types of cancer with respect to socioeconnomic, geographical and clinical stats. This data would then be made publicly available to facilitate researchers who look for trends. This would greatly improve our ability to spot clusters and identify new risk factors

- Fund research that follows survivors long term and provide follow up care to survivors. they are a growing but largely undefined segment as far as health care is concerned.