A few days ago Emily Browne at NHDP probed the dark underbelly of the GOPer idea of health care "reform," and made a pretty powerful and salient point (in part, from an email release):Ayotte is pushing a GOP establishment health care plan that would do away with essential state-level consumer protections that hold insurance companies accountable to New Hampshire residents. Under 'KellyCare' insurance companies would no longer have to cover:
* Mammography and other kinds of breast cancer screening
* OB/GYN care
* Pregnancy, delivery and postpartum coverage
* Care for newborn children
* Reconstructive surgery after a mastectomy
* Hair prosthesis after chemotherapy
* Certain kinds of bone marrow transplants to treat breast cancer
* Contraceptive services When Paul Hodes held a media conference call on the same topic, Ayotte quickly shot back (in part):"As a mother and a daughter of course I support coverage for women for these important procedures. What I do not support are mandates that require people to purchase insurance policies that cover things like aromatherapy, hair implants, and gastric bypass surgery. Requiring these coverages drives up the cost of health care for consumers and reduces affordable choices for families." I suppose it's possible Ayotte isn't confusing the difference between hair prosthesis and hair implants, and somehow brought that up out of the blue. But based on the context, I think it's unlikely.
As some of you know, my mother passed away last August from ovarian cancer. And I have another cancer saga in my family at even a closer proximity that I am not going to share at the moment.
Chemotherapy sucks. While everyone's treatment is different, in general it zaps your strength and your appetite and socks you with nausea. You can lose feeling in the nerves of your hands and feet. Your vision can get messed up. Your body weight can go up or down in unexpected ways. And that's just the big stuff.
Chemotherapy (speaking very generally, of course, about a treatment with a thousand variations depending on diagnosis) can be effective because it kills cells that reproduce quickly, such as cancer cells.
The cells that make up our hair, unfortunately, also fall into that category.
My mother raised two kids all on her own while working full-time as a secretary. When she started chemo, she was close to retirement, but not quite there yet. The pounding that her body took as a result of treatment (that was intially quite effective) resulted in her inability to work.
Losing hair on top of all of that is a tremendous blow to one's dignity. And, to add insult to injury, when you find yourself in the situation where you actually are shopping around for wigs, you realize - the ones that actually would give you the look of having hair are not cheap.
You can imagine my mother's delight when she discovered that she could actually afford a wig because her insurance covered it. It was a tiny thing compared to the enormous medical challenge in front of her and her immediate future, but it gave her the confidence to get out of her house and not feel awkward socially. It allowed her, despite the awfulness of the other parts of chemo, to have some small share of normalcy in a life that had been upended.
Now, my mom didn't live in New Hampshire, but if she did, she would have had her prosthesis covered here too (.pdf document): "Coverage applies to hair prostheses worn for hair loss suffered as a result of alopecia areta, alopecia totalis, alopecia medicamentosa resulting from the treatment of any form of cancer or leukemia, or permanent loss of scalp hair due to injury. This coverage is subject to a written recommendation by the treating physician stating that the hair prosthesis is a medical necessity."
When candidates cast their net for larger numbers of votes by throwing smaller, vulnerable constituencies under the bus - in this case, via a sneaky combination of "implants" and "aromatherapy," the latter of which isn't required to be covered in NH - it should tell you something about the depth and sincerity of the concern for the people they would represent. |
