Chris Collins, a GOP congressional candidate, knows that health care is very expensive these days but he argues that the reason for this is very good. Collins said that people are not dying from deadly forms of cancer anymore.
“People now don’t die from prostate cancer, breast cancer and some of the other things,” Collins said when he was interviewed by The Batavian earlier this week. Collins was attempting to discuss his want to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law.
“The fact of the matter is, our healthcare today is so much better, we’re living so much longer, because of innovations in drug development, surgical procedures, stents, implantable cardiac defibrillators, neural stimulators — they didn’t exist 10 years ago,” he continued. “The increase in cost is not because doctors are making a lot more money. It’s what you can get for healthcare, extending your life and curing diseases.”
On the contrary to Collins’ comments, a lot of people die from breast cancer and prostate cancer in the United States. In the country, roughly 577,190 people will die as a result of cancer this year. This number includes the 39,920 deaths caused by breast cancer and the 28.170 deaths caused by prostate cancer, according to the American Cancer Society. The American Cancer Society also noted that people who are uninsured are less likely to find cancer in its early stages, which makes it much more expensive to treat once it is found.
Collins is going up against Representative Kathy Hochul, a Democrat from New York, who was voted into office via a special election in May of 2011. Hochul said on Monday of this week that she knows the signature health care law from Obama is not perfect but that Congress has to address other issues in the country right now.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty about this, but it is now the law of the land and they understand that,” Hochul said while at a town hall in Victor, New York. “And we don’t want to take this country backward and re-litigate and re-fight over this. We’ve got a lot of other issues to deal with. We’ve got an economy that has to get back on track.”
Collins said that Hochul should not have politicized cancer.
“As the brother of a breast cancer survivor, I am grateful for the medical advances that saved my sister’s life, which would not have been possible a generation ago,” he stated. “I find it troubling that Kathy Hochul would politicize the seriousness of cancer.”