The Affordable Care Act and Preventive Health

Floor Speech

Ms. DeLAURO. Mr. Speaker, 27 years ago, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I was lucky. I had excellent doctors who detected the cancer by chance in stage 1. I underwent radiation treatment for 2 1/2 months. Because of the grace of God and biomedical research, I stand here today, and I am fortunate to say that I have been cancer free ever since.

I can tell you for a fact that access to preventive health care saved my life. If my ovarian cancer had not been diagnosed and caught in stage 1, I might not be here today, but many women are not so lucky as over 15,000 die every year from ovarian cancer. While I survived by that off chance of luck in that diagnosis, no one should have to survive by luck, which is why my Democratic colleagues and I worked hard.

We worked very hard to make sure that prevention and wellness are such a critical part of the Affordable Care Act. Before we passed this transformative piece of legislation, one in five women over age 50 had not had a mammogram in the past 2 years, mostly because she could not afford one. Now mammograms are covered--they are covered for all Americans--with no out-of-pocket costs. So are annual checkups, colonoscopies, diabetes, and other cancer screenings--at no cost. Let me repeat that. They are the beneficiaries of lifesaving treatments.

Preventive care not only helps to keep Americans healthier; it also helps to drive down the cost of health care so that people can get access to the services that they need. Chronic and often preventable diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, cause seven out of 10 deaths in the United States of America, and they account for 75 percent of our health spending. Preventive care can help Americans avoid these ailments or to catch them before it is too late.

That is what the Affordable Care Act does. That is what the people of this country need to know. There are countless stories, after stories, after stories of people's lives being saved because they have the opportunity to get a treatment or something that says you may be at risk for a particular disease, and you can get that identification not by luck but as a routine checkup. No one in the United States of America should survive by luck. Now we have an opportunity through the Affordable Care Act, which is the law of the land today, to make sure that everyone--man and woman--can get those services.

If you expand access to preventive health, it drives the costs down, but most importantly, it saves lives. Isn't that worth doing, to be able to save someone's life? That is what the Affordable Care Act is all about. It is just one of the many ways that it is good for men, for women, for families in this Nation, and it is good for America to move in this direction.

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