Thompson Calls to Eradicate Breast Cancer by 2015 Sets Himself Apart as the Healthcare Candidate
As Secretary, Tommy Thompson made a difference by helping seniors with prescription drugs. Today, during the ABC Presidential Debate, Thompson called for eradicating breast cancer by 2015.
"I know that there are treatments and potential remedies that we may not be considering in the United States. It's essential that this be a global fight with the best minds from across the globe engaged in the effort."
"Here's the bottom line: The only way to find the cure for breast cancer is for the President of the United States to set a goal and motivate our government and private companies to reach it. We can afford to do it and it's the right thing to do," said Thompson
The key points to the Thompson Breast Cancer Plan include:
1) Recruit a successful corporate executive to lead a team of doctors, researchers, nurses and breast cancer victims who will be charged with setting benchmark goals and making recommendations for research funding.
2) Establish fifteen $10 million prizes for corporations, Universities or research centers that solve benchmark problems related to curing breast cancer.
3) Double the budget of the National Institute of Health to $56 billion from its current level of $28 billion. Direct the additional funding to worthy public and private research projects.
4) Travel to key countries in the world recruiting their governments and research universities to join the effort. Tommy Thompson will re-establish America's leadership role and do it with medical and health care breakthroughs.
5) Create an open source research community on the Internet where research can be organized and discussions can be conducted with experts. This online community will be a centralized repository for research where all of the world's people can contribute their time, money or expertise toward helping with this global fight.
At the ABC News debate in Des Moines, Iowa, this morning, former Governor and HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson clearly demonstrated his knowledge and understanding of the problems facing the health care industry, and separated himself from the field of candidates by outlining his plans for reform.
Thompson's plan for health care reform includes the following points:
We must build a system centered on preventive medicine, rather than curative. In this country, we wait until people get sick and then spend billions of dollars to try to make them well again. Why not invest up front in keeping our families healthy in the first place?
We must use information technology to cut costs, reduce medical errors and create a more efficient health care system. Our doctors use the latest technology to cure your illnesses, but manila folders to keep track what's wrong with you. The industry needs to work together to overcome the barriers to implementing information technology in the health field. We must make sure different systems to communicate with each other, so the information on a patient from a doctor's office in Iowa is useful to a hospital in California. Doctors, nurses and technicians must know how to use this new technology and health care providers must be sure the technology is having the intended effect - that is, to save money and more importantly, to save lives.
Third, we must use the private sector and public sector to provide health insurance for all. It is a basic common sense approach to keeping people healthy and reining in health care costs. Governor Thompson proposes requiring states to organize purchasing pools among the uninsured. Such an arrangement would provide health insurance for families, while allowing the purchasing pools to negotiate better prices for care. It is unfair that the uninsured are often the only ones to be charged full price for health care, simply because they don't have the purchasing power of those with health insurance.
We must, once and for all, make sure health care and long-term care is affordable. For government, our Medicare and Medicaid systems will soon break the budgets – and families across America are grappling with how to pay for long-term care for themselves and for their parents. This isn't a problem that will go away if we simply ignore it.
