Friend of OTBKB and longtime Park Sloper, Mary Crowley, had this letter in today’s New York Times. She is director of public affairs and communications at the Hastings
Center, the nation’s first bioethics research organization.

Re “Cancer Society Focuses Its Ads on the Uninsured” (front page, Aug. 31):

That
the American Cancer Society has shifted its entire advertising budget
from prevention of the nation’s second deadliest killer to the mortal
costs of uninsurance dramatically connects the dots between our 47
million uninsured and avoidable death. The current situation, in which
a tenth of all cancer patients are uninsured and a quarter of families
battling it are impoverished by the fight, is not the war on cancer the
nation should be waging.

Bravo to the cancer society for making
it clear that this is a moral problem that belies American values like
choice, beneficence and compassion — values over which no party can
take ownership. It is tragic and a travesty that a single cancer
patient in the United States should succumb because of lack of access
to screening or treatment.

Mary Crowley
Sept. 1, 2007