When The Wellness Community and Gilda’s Club Worldwide joined together in 2009 to form the Cancer Support Community (CSC), they made it their goal to educate Americans in general about cancer and “to ensure that all people impacted by cancer are empowered by knowledge, strengthened by action and sustained by community.” Now, the organization has launched the Cancer Policy Institute, going one step further to ensure that everyone in the U.S. has access to affordable and comprehensive cancer care.
Last year, notes an article in U.S. News and World Report, CSC provided in excess of $40 million in services to patients and their families. This included support groups, educational workshops, exercise programs and social activities. With the launching of the Cancer Policy Institute (CPI), that work will extend to government policy and other issues effecting whether or not all Americans have the same opportunities for good care, regardless of their income bracket or where they live.
Though $2.87 trillion was spent on health care in the United States in 2012, including $979 billion in federal spending, there are plenty of discrepancies when it comes to how the funds are distributed, experts note.
“When you think about the health care system, you have to understand that health care costs and quality of care is not uniformly distributed across the population,” said Ezekial Emanuel, keynote speaking at the launching of the CPI and vice provost for Global Initiatives and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Emanuel explained that approximately 50 percent of the population doesn’t participate in the health care system. This portion is made up of younger, healthy individuals. “People who periodically receive medical assistance, such as those with allergies or who are more prone to colds and the flu, make up another 40 percent of the population,” the article explains. That means the remaining 10 percent, which includes cancer patients, is the portion of the U.S. population that uses the most health care dollars.
“If [we] want to improve the system, we will have to focus on those patients because those are the ones who are high-cost and where there are quality problems,” Emanuel stressed.
Emanuel also told the audience that cancer care has risen almost 600 percent during the last 30 years, a staggering number that has had an effect on the lives of many individuals within the United States. Patients need to be more aware of their healthcare options, the CPI stresses, which will allow them to make better, more cost-effective decisions about treatment. That will lead to better treatment experiences, Emanuel explains.
“We need to figure out how to change how we are delivering care,” Emanuel said. “No person should go through cancer alone, and no person should go through an uncoordinated, disjointed system where they are suffering from cancer, have to do all the running around and do all the navigation themselves.”
One of the first task members of the CPI plan to undertake is to meet with politicians to discuss health care policy changes.