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SALT LAKE CITY — Cathy Colledge is undergoing her second round of breast cancer treatments.
The retired first grade teacher has a $3,000-a-month copay on her hormone blocker, Ibrance, which helps mitigate breast cancer tumors.
"That's my entire income," Colledge said.
Pfizer can offer to pay up to six months' worth of a patient's co-pay, but Colledge's insurance has a stipulation — if Pfizer pays the copay, that money doesn't count toward her almost $4,000 deductible. This is called co-pay accumulation.
A bill brought up in the 2023 Utah legislative session, SB184, had the potential to help Colledge, and others in similar situations, to overcome the stipulation and receive that assistance, but the bill didn't survive.
On Tuesday, the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network brought together a panel — made up of Colledge and three other American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network volunteers, three Utah legislators, two doctors and a SelectHealth insurance spokesman — at the state Capitol to figure out how the financial burdens of surviving cancer can be overcome.
Utah Rep. Robert Spendlove, R-Sandy; Rep. Cory Maloy, R-Lehi; and Utah Sen. Jen Plumb, D-Salt Lake City, talked about why the co-pay accumulation bill didn't pass; Maloy included that he misunderstood the bill. Their discussion emphasized, in part, the impact the bill would have had — for less than 25% of the Utah population, SelectHealth insurance spokesman Eric Cannon said.
The president of BioUtah, Kelvyn Cullimore, said insurance companies claimed they would lose $3 million to $4 million if the bill passed, which is why the companies were against the bill.
Among the other volunteers was Katie Adams-Anderton, who is traveling to Washington, D.C., on Saturday to meet with U.S. legislators about sponsoring bills that can help cancer patients pay for their treatments.
She wants to make a point to legislators: "Cancer is non-discriminatory. It does not care if you're Republican or Democrat, unaffiliated, Black, white, Hispanic; cancer does not care," Adams-Anderton said.
She said she she thinks more people are willing to come together to help cancer patients and hopes this reminder will help advance testing and treatments.
"When I went through my double mastectomy ... it cost $1.2 million," Adams-Anderton said. "Luckily, I had really good health care, but not a lot of people do."
"I want people to be aware that no matter what they're hearing on the news, not everything that could be done is being done," Colledge said. "We, as a society, need to correct that because this is serious business. Cancer is taking really valuable lives, so we need to be focusing on doing more socially, politically, financially, whatever we can do."
Along with co-pay accumulation, the panel discussed possible insurance and legislative solutions for biomarker and multi-cancer early detection testing. These types of testing help detect cancer cells in the bloodstream before a tumor is discovered, catching things even mammography might miss.
The panel also defined that the hope for any changes in cancer treatment affordability is that if these changes can be done for cancer, the next step should be making those same changes in Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, diabetes and so on.
Adams-Anderton will be traveling to Washington, D.C., with another volunteer, Catherine Standiford, who also owns Cancer Rehabilitation Centers. Standiford has met with legislators at the U.S. Capitol in the past and said she has low expectations for the difference that will be made. Adams-Anderton is looking forward to her first time meeting with legislators and hopes to make headway with legislators on getting insurance coverage for genetic testing.
