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Toledo
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has announced that Spain will regulate the right to “cancer oblivion” as of June. If facing cancer is already a path plagued, many times, with obstacles, resuming the life one had before is not free of difficulties either. Those who have overcome this disease or have it chronically denounce the obstacles they suffer when taking out life insurance in order to access a loan or a mortgage and ask for this right to be regulated.
Sonia Marchán is president of AMUMA, the association of women affected by gynecological cancer in Ciudad Real. She overcame bone cancer 23 years ago and another breast cancer four years ago and, to this day, she continues to have difficulties getting health insurance. “When I was 17 years old, I was diagnosed with bone cancer and when I finished the treatment I finished my studies and joined the working life. I applied for a mortgage and they forced me to take out life insurance,” she says.
Knowing the employee who attended him at the bank made things easier for him. “He only asked me if the problem he had had was solved. We did not name him, nor did it state anywhere that he had had cancer and I was able to take out the mortgage, which is linked to life insurance, without problems.” He did not have the same luck a few years ago when he tried to buy health insurance. When he called on the phone and they asked me if he had a criminal record, they hung up on me,” he recalls.
In which they did not hang up the phone, Sonia explains that the insurance did not cover anything that had happened to her due to bone cancer and breast cancer. “I had to wait ten years and be discharged from oncology and still with a very high premium and very high copays.” “It is totally discriminatory. It does not matter to you to have health insurance. It is unfair that we cannot contract these services and the right to have our cancer history forgotten must be regulated,” she adds.
The difficulties go further and even affect something as simple as the renewal of the driver’s license, essential for many of these women to be able to rejoin the labor market. “Breast cancer patients have to work to continue eating and paying our bills,” says Sonia, who regrets that on many occasions they have to lie to be able to access something as simple as renewing their driver’s license on equal terms.
“Right to redo our lives”
Spain is, along with Malta, the only country in the European Union that has not regulated this right that cancer patient associations have been demanding for years to put an end to a situation that Sonia Marchán does not hesitate to describe as “discriminatory”. “Both banks and insurers close their doors on us and on many occasions they look at us as if we were plagued. It is totally discriminatory because life goes on and we have the right to rebuild our lives and move on.”
The initiative announced by Pedro Sánchez seeks to declare null and void all the clauses that exclude or discriminate against people with a cancer history who want to access these products. It will only suffice to have overcome cancer five years before subscribing to the service without a subsequent relapse. To this end, the Government will modify the General Law for the Defense of Consumers and Users and other complementary laws, and the Insurance Contract Law.
According to a report carried out last year by the Josep Carreras Foundation, 83 percent of leukemia patients or ex-patients between the ages of 18 and 35 say they have had difficulties in taking out life insurance. An oversight that a 2018 law did specify for people with HIV but that did not include other diseases and that people who have survived cancer or have it chronically sue to recover their lives and stop being stigmatized.
2023-05-13 19:27:52
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