1. United States
2. Wash.
3. Letter

I am your constituent and I want you to know that commercial health insurance companies don’t have your constituent’s best interest at heart. Here is what I learned from an NBC analysis of denials of payment for treatment for cancer patients. First, you should know that 2 million people are diagnosed with cancer yearly and it kills more than 600,000 each year, A 2022 member survey conducted by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, a network of 50,000 cancer professionals, found that 42% of prior authorizations were delayed by more than one business day and that 14% of the delays resulted in a “serious adverse event for a patient.” The oncologists described the serious adverse event as “delay of treatment” 96% of the time, “denial of treatment” 87% of the time, “disease progression” 80% of the time, and “loss of life” 36% of the time. A study published last year in JAMA Network, a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that 22% of cancer patients did not receive the care their doctors prescribed because of authorization delays or outright denials. The result is that you can go bankrupt or you can just die. Is that what you want? Not what I want because they need to feed the machine that generates cash by denying treatment and keeping premiums. There is NO TRANSPARENCY ON WHAT IS OR ISN’T COVERED. But there is with Universal Healthcare. This system is busy creating widows, widowers and orphans to generate cash and you can fix it. I want you to get universal healthcare up for a vote According to a National Institute of Health report 62% of Americans want Universal Healthcare. Just do what your constituents want. Thank you. Here are the references for you to review NIH report on acceptability of Universal Healthcare, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3076976/ NBC report on denied cancer treatment. - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/-lived-health-insurance-companies-deny-cancer-care-patients-rcna182611 JAMA reort on cancer patients NOT GETTING TREATMENT - https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2810824 American Society of Clinical Oncology Report on denied care - https://society.asco.org/sites/new-www.asco.org/files/ASCO-Prior-Auth-Survey-Summary-November-2022.pdf” https://dl-rapidbot.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/attachments/1/0e7c/5cbb/0e7c5cbb-abc4-4e3b-8c02-b946d75dd8b3.php