Cancer care rationing begins in America as cancer clinics turn away thousands of Medicare patients

Thursday, April 11, 2013 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: sequester, cancer care, health care rationing

(NaturalNews) Federal sequestration measures that came into effect on April 1 are making it impossible for many cancer clinics across the country to administer conventional care to patients, and particularly to those on Medicare. Consequently, thousands of cancer patients with taxpayer-funded insurance coverage are being turned away, according to reports, as clinics simply do not have the capacity nor the funding to administer expensive pharmaceutical-based treatments such as chemotherapy.

According to the Washington Post, many cancer clinics are having to turn away patients without adequate coverage, or else face potential closure of their practices. Since many of the latest cancer drugs now cost upwards of $35,000 or more per year, it is grossly unsustainable to deliver such treatments to patients without adequate insurance coverage -- doing so would spell financial suicide for even the most successful and well-funded cancer clinics.

"If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we'd be out of business in six months to a year," said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York, to the Washington Post. "The drugs we're going to lose money on we're not going to administer right now."

Back in October, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, another New York-based cancer center, announced that it would not be administering an expensive new cancer drug known as Zaltrap (ziv-afilbercept), a Sanofi-Aventis creation designed to treat metastatic colorectal cancer. According to an op-ed piece published by The New York Times (NYT), an average month's worth of treatment with Zaltrap costs more than $11,000, or more than $132,000 per year.

"We don't sugar-coat things, we're cancer doctors," explained Charles Holladay, an oncologist at the Charleston Cancer Center in South Carolina, to the Washington Post. Holladay's facility began informing many of its government-covered patients several weeks ago that they would have to seek out alternative treatment options.

"We tell them that if we don't go this course, it's just a matter of time before we go out of business," he added.

Prevention, natural treatments are the keys to beating cancer and avoiding a total healthcare meltdown

Even if sequestration was not a factor in the current cancer treatment crisis, the ever-escalating costs of conventional cancer treatments would still be bankrupting an already-overburdened American healthcare system. The public at large is still not being informed about effective cancer prevention strategies, for instance, nor is there any effort whatsoever being made by public health authorities to teach people about effective natural cancer treatment options like the Gerson Therapy protocol, Indian black salve, and all-natural cannabis oil.

This, of course, is due to the fact that the conventional healthcare system is owned and operated by the pharmaceutical cartel, which has no interest in actually healing people. Instead, a sadistic combination of greed and eugenics is what drives healthcare, and especially the cancer industry, today -- and this death-care model is directly responsible for pushing the healthcare system to the precipice of complete destruction.

"With an aging global population and an endless conveyor belt of expensive new drugs and technologies and increasing financial pressures, the cost of cancer care in high-income countries is becoming unsustainable," said the journal The Lancet Oncology in a statement back in 2011 about the failure of the conventional cancer industry.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.washingtonpost.com

http://www.nytimes.com

http://www.fiercepharma.com