On the recordJuly 19, 2011
We had a town hall meeting in my district, talking about the Medicare program. We had Dr. Rebecca Andrews--she's a primary care doc at the University of Connecticut Health Center--and she was talking about the new annual screening coverage where she had one of her patients who was kind of a big husky guy, kind of. They used to kind of razz each other. But she had 45 minutes with him. She did the soup-to-nuts checkup. She ordered a urine test, which she normally wouldn't with the old system. She found a tiny, microscopic spec of blood, or they did at the lab, which they were a little concerned about. She called him back in, did a follow-up. It turned out he had bladder cancer. Because they were able to detect it so quickly because of that annual checkup and the cancer screening tests that are now covered under Medicare, it was a day surgery, in and out, a really very nonintrusive event that cost a fraction of what it would have been if he had not had that checkup to detect that cancer early. And she had at least two other patients, because of the new Affordable Care Act annual checkup, where they detected cancer and again were able to intervene at a low cost compared to what it would have been if it had been a full-blown case.
