Oh Shut Up and Pass the Chemo.

Tommy Douglas's bones must be doing wheelies. Yesterday in Toronto a young woman with breast cancer went public about being denied coverage under our universal health care system. She would have to pay for an adjuvent chemotherapy drug found to decrease recurrence of her type of cancer because her tumour hadn't grown big enough yet. Hold the presses. Tumour you say? Check. Malignant cancer? Check. Needs chemo? Check. Resident of Ontario? Ooooooh. Sorry. You're just going to have to wait for your malignant cancer to double in size. Then it will be big enough to merit OHIP coverage. Not big enough yet? Not big enough to be more statistically likely to recur? Not big enough to complicate her recovery? Not big enough to result in a less optimal outcome? As the Flying Circus would say: "Not bloody likely!" Forget that this flies in the face of all public campaigns urging us to seek treatment early and not ignore the signs. Forget that the Hippocratic Oath we swore to as first year medical students went something like: "first do no harm". Forget the optics (if you can because they are really bad) of telling a 35 year old woman with undeniable breast cancer, to take her chances at recurrence, because her lesion must double in size to be considered eligible for OHIP coverage. Consider just this: in three other Canadian provinces (Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia) her chemotherapy would be fully covered. So she is going to pony up 50G's to walk the road each of us prays we can dodge in our lifetime. Who said we don't have two tiered medicine? I don't know what additional hardship this price tag will cause her and her family. I don't know anything about this lady. I do know that sometimes life is a crap shoot. This young mother came up on the short end of the stick just now. Our health care system ought to be improving her odds for survival, not gambling on them.