Our Observation

There’s less than a month to go before Winter Parkers take their first few steps on Showalter Field to raise money for the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life event.

If it seems like that event is getting bigger every year, that’s because it is, and it must. In the last 10 years, the cost of cancer treatment has exploded, and we’re no closer to having a means for the average American to afford it.

Meanwhile, thanks to the current political climate, the idea of making it affordable to stay healthy has become so politically poisonous that some lawmakers who’ve attempted to do so — even those who’ve been wildly successful — are being forced to apologize for it.

And those who’ve attempted to draw a spotlight to the absurd notion that even cheap (not free) health care for all will destroy the country may literally be taking that idea to their graves.

On March 26, Geraldine Ferraro, a pioneering politician who became the first major party female vice presidential candidate in U.S. history, died of multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood affecting 50,000 Americans. But her battle had been a long one, much longer than her doctors had predicted.

Diagnosed in 1998, she helped push for better drugs to treat it. That development quickly improved her lifespan beyond her initial three-year prognosis. In 2007, she was in remission from that cancer, six years after doctors said she would be dead. Taking drugs that didn’t even exist when she was first diagnosed, she said she was happy to see treatment moving forward, but was alarmed as she watched the cost of cancer drugs soar along with them.

“It just is a very, very expensive thing to do,” she said, referring specifically to her $1,000-per-injection cancer treatments. “What bothers me is that what’s available to me is not available to every person who has cancer in this country and it should be.”

Four years later, the most effective drugs for myeloma cost $6,200 per month, and that price is rising, putting the drugs out-of-the-question for the average American, even those with health insurance.

It’s a gap that we’ve struggled, and failed miserably, to close. Pharmaceutical companies have to be prodded into developing drugs with a promise of a shareholder-justifiable profit at the end, or they won’t bother. So drugs that do come to fruition and move cancer treatment forward invariably cost more than their predecessors. The caveat of more advanced treatment has been that less and less are able to afford it.

Yet during a decade in which public figures and celebrities have shed such brilliant light on the cost of staying healthy in America, the politics of health care itself has become so perversely anti-public that even programs that are obviously for the good of the people, like keeping everybody healthy, are political quagmires waiting to happen.

Mitt Romney, who has been repeatedly declared the unofficial Republican frontrunner for the nomination for the presidential election in 2012, has over the past two years been forced to defend or even apologize for having created a near-universal health care system in Massachusetts.

The reason: Because even though he created that health care reform program in 2006, well before the current president was elected, his Republican health insurance reform program has been deemed “too similar” to the Democrat president’s plan, enacted in 2010.

On April 12, supporters of Romney’s health reform plan, which gave 98 percent of Massachusetts residents health coverage, and saved the state nearly $300 million over the previous year (a spending cut of more than 40 percent), celebrated its fifth-year anniversary.

Romney wasn’t at that celebration, because the idea of saving his state hundreds of millions of dollars while giving 99.8 percent of children health coverage is now considered too dangerous a subject leading into the Republican primary race.

“It’s saving lives,” Romney told Fox News in 2010. “It is the ultimate pro-life effort.”

Now tiptoeing into the presidential race, he’s being forced to explain why, as a Republican, his convictions could possibly support universal healthcare. That battle shows no signs of abating.

In a few weeks, Winter Park’s relay will take a few more steps toward improving cancer treatment. In the months and years to follow, we can only hope that politics steps forward toward a day when we can all afford it.