Despite the amazing advances taking place in cancer care, too many patients face unnecessary barriers to access this knowledge and level of care – and suffer as a result.
Californians have a chance to remove unfair barriers that prevent many cancer patients from getting the care they need.
At least 187,140 Californians will be diagnosed with cancer this year. This is equivalent to nearly 21 new cancer cases every hour of every day. Thousands of these new cancer patients will be misdiagnosed or placed on treatment regimens that are inappropriate or ineffective for their condition.
Though grateful for the treatment he’d received, Don knew his condition required specialty care. He sought research centers where he could access what he described as the “leading-edge stuff.”
A doctor explained to Laura Holmes Haddad, then a 37-year-old mother of two young children, that the pain and irritation she was experiencing in 2012 was caused by breast-feeding.
The tumor at the base of Anthony Wright’s spine had caused him tremendous pain for 10 weeks before it was identified in November 2018. Thanksgiving with his wife, JoAnn, and their adult children — bedside in the hospital — brought a second blow. The cancer had actually started in his lung and spread to his back.
When Tabitha Paccione went from great health to coughing fits and severe fatigue in 2015, doctors couldn’t figure out why. For 10 months, she endured a series of misdiagnoses and treatments, with no success. Then, a scan turned up a two-inch tumor on Tabitha’s left lung. Worse news followed. The disease had spread to her bones, […]
For Chuck Fata, it started in 2015, with back pain. At first, he and his doctor saw the problem as a symptom of a too-busy life. The pain got worse, though, and three months later, tumors showed up on a diagnostic test. Chuck’s battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma was a tough one. Each time he thought […]
Josh Seigel visited the urgent care for help with groin pain in late 2019. The doctor there said it was the result of an infection and gave him antibiotics. When the ache returned in just a month, Josh found out what was really going on. He had testicular cancer. Consulting with a surgeon near his […]
A cluster of serious and extremely painful symptoms — including brittle bones and kidney problems — sent Donna McNutt to the hospital near her Orange County home in 2015. The diagnosis was a shock for her and her family: a rare blood cancer called multiple myeloma. A cancer doctor at that hospital offered a grim […]
At age 29, Kommah McDowell was seeing a lot of her primary care physician. A painful mass in her right breast had Kommah concerned. For seven months in 2005, the doctor reassured her that she was too young to have cancer. That doctor was wrong. Without proper diagnostic testing, Kommah had lost precious time in […]
The cancer patients bill of rights:
Six important rights that every cancer patient in California should expect from the time of diagnosis
Create transparency in cancer outcomes:
Patients and their families should know where they can get safe, effective, and expert care
Researchers argue legislative mandate for the California Cancer Registry (CCR) should be expanded to use registry data for quality measurement and public reporting, make case for linking registry data with health insurance claims data.
UC Davis researchers find cancer patients with Medi-Cal receive poorer quality care and have lower survival rates than patients with employer-sponsored, Medicare, or other types of insurance.
Issue brief documents association between low hospital surgery volume and higher mortality and complication rates.
Journal article concludes academic cancer centers have shown superior survival outcomes compared with community settings, summarizes challenges of access, high costs, and defining and demonstrating value.
City of Hope-issued white paper on why cancer care is different.
Report finds Medicaid managed care is likely to have mixed impact on access and little evidence of its impact on quality.
Study finds NCI-Designated Cancer Centers had improved mortality rates in Acute Myeloid Leukemia over non-NCI-designated cancer centers.
Report finds narrow networks are more likely to exclude oncologists affiliated with NCI-Designated Cancer Centers.
Read the California Cancer