A new approach to health insurance

The New York Health Act is again being pushed this year in the New York State Assembly and Senate. Many Democrats have advocated for this change to single-payer health care in New York over the past two decades but have come up empty.

With Democratic supermajorities in both houses, it certainly seemed like this major change — that would eliminate private health insurance in New York — could happen this year. But then Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins pulled the bill from consideration in the state health committee, meaning it won’t even leave the committee by the end of the year. There’s always next year.

But that’s the point. It’s always next year. We can argue why I believe this resolution would be bad for New York: the unsustainable taxes it would put on small businesses, the loss of all private health insurance, the union and insured resistance that will come from threats to their health insurance and the drawing off of funds to Medicare and Medicaid that will be necessitated by the expansive legislation.

Proponents will argue that most of that is not true, but it seems pretty obvious. At least it will become so if this bill passes. We can see this in states that have passed versions of single-payer like California and Vermont, who when faced with the costs, have failed to implement the change.

It is time for a new approach that will achieve more political buy-in from both parties and from the public. We know that without health care, thousands die when they could be saved and many in pain go untreated. A narrower focus could help us achieve a good number of our goals.

Cancer is a disease that touches everyone and is also a disease we can quantify. We know approximately how many people are diagnosed with cancer every year and the cost to treat them.In 2020, there were 1,806,590 new cancer diagnoses and 606,530 cancer deaths in the United States. Every year, 110,000 New Yorkers are diagnosed with cancer.

The cost of treating cancer nationally is near $150 billion, according to Health Payer Intelligence (healthpayerintelligence.com), and some estimates put the average cost of treatment at $100,000, according to The New York Times (well.blogs.nytimes.com). That price estimate would put the cost of treating every cancer diagnosis in New York state at $11 billion.

That is a high cost, but it is also a known cost that can be budgeted for. It is also a cost that the state can use to negotiate with health insurance companies to lower health care premiums. The state would be taking $11 billion of costs off New York health insurers’ books and giving them known savings, plus the state would be removing the instability of rising costs. That savings and the removal of the unknown should be reflected in reduced premiums from health insurers.

Other diseases cause pain and death and need to be addressed, but cancer is the second-most deadly disease, and treating it requires medical intervention. It will have the broadest appeal in part because there’s not a single person whose life has not been touched by cancer, but also because of the seeming randomness of who gets cancer.

Some lifetime smokers get lung cancer while some non-smokers do too, and some smokers never get cancer. Why do some children get cancer? Once this plan for cancer is established, it’s anticipated that New York state will look at covering other diseases.

This would be a start at covering what’s been a plague for centuries. There’s some evidence of cancer in early Egypt. We must start somewhere toward assuring New Yorkers that a cancer diagnosis is not a death sentence. I hope that if single-payer fails to move through the state, as it should, the New York State Assembly and Senate will put forward companion bills that would fully cover cancer treatment in the 2023 New York state budget.