The Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act: Playing Politics with Health Care

The Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act is a bill that was introduced on the floor of the House of Representatives in January of 2011 by Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut. If enacted, this legislation would require insurance companies to cover a minimum of 48 hours of hospital time for any woman who has had a lumpectomy or mastectomy performed as a treatment for breast cancer. For those women having lumpectomies, this law would also require insurance companies to pay for the cost of the radiation therapy that always accompanies this procedure.

The Horror of the Drive-Thru Mastectomy
While twenty states have already passed laws requiring insurance companies to cover breast cancer surgery aftercare, the lack of a federal law has given the insurance industry a lot of leeway in this area. Surgeons are nearly unanimous in supporting 48-hour hospital stays for women who have had mastectomies or lumpectomies because of the risk of complications. Many insurers, however, refuse to pay for hospital stays of more than a day, or even more than a few hours in some cases. There are literally thousands of horror stories of women who have had breast cancer surgery being forced to leave their hospital beds while still groggy from anesthesia or suffering from pain or bleeding or having no place to go or no one available to pick them up. These “drive-thru mastectomies,” as they have come to be called, are the scourge of breast cancer patients and their surgeons alike, and the Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act would end these insurance industry practices once and for all.

On the surface, it seems like this is the kind of common-sense legislation that everyone would want to support. And indeed, that has been the case in the past – when Congresswoman DeLauro previously introduced this bill to the House of Representatives in 2009, it eventually passed by a margin of 421 – 2. Congressional rules state, however, that if legislation has not been voted on in both the House and Senate by the end of a particular session, the bill’s sponsors essentially must start from scratch and re-introduce their legislation when the new Congress opens for business. After its passage by the House in 2009, the Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act was sent on to the Senate, where it and a similar piece of Senate legislation were then passed on to committee for reconciliation. Unfortunately, neither the House nor the Senate bill, nor a combination of the two, emerged from committee in time to be voted on by the Senate before the last congressional session expired. And thus, Rep. DeLauro was forced to re-introduce the bill on the floor of the House as the new Congress convened earlier this year.