GOP Candidate Chris Collins: ‘People Now Don’t Die From Prostate Cancer, Breast Cancer’

GOP candidate Chris Collins is under fire for a huge mistake he made to The Batavian during an interview, remarking that, “People now don’t die from prostate cancer, breast cancer and some of the other things.”

His mistake was immediately caught by his Democratic opponent, Rep. Kathleen C. Hochul, who reacted through a campaign statement, saying that Collins showed “a stunning lack of sensitivity,” according to Buffalo News. She went on to say that:

“Tragically, nearly 70,000 people will die this year from these two types of cancer alone. We can disagree about public policy without making these kinds of outrageous and offensive statements.”

Collins, like any true opponent, fired back by the end of the day on Tuesday, criticizing Hochul for making cancer into a political issue. His rebuttal to her was:

“As the brother of a breast cancer survivor, I am grateful for the medical advances that saved my sister’s life, which would not have been possible a generation ago.”

He went on to express that he is running for Congress partially so that “we put a stop to the Hochul/Obama plan to put government bureaucrats in between doctors and patients like my sister.”

The Huffington Post reports that, despite treatment advances, a lot of people still die from breast cancer, making Collins’ statement completely false. The American Cancer Society reports that about 577,190 people in the U.S. will die from cancer in 2012, with 39,920 deaths from breast cancer and 28,170 from prostate cancer.

Chris Collins went on to say, according to The Huffington Post, that:

“The fact of the matter is, our healthcare today is so much better, we’re living so much longer, because of innovations in drug development, surgical procedures, stents, implantable cardiac defibrillators, neural stimulators — they didn’t exist 10 years ago.”

Art Voice notes, however, that if the Republican hopeful had bothered to do his research, he would have already known that, “the implantable cardiac defibrillator and neural stimulators, or TENS devices, were both invented and patented in the late 60s or early 70s; therefore, they existed ’10 years ago.'”

What do you think of GOP Candidate Chris Collins’ amazingly uninformed comment?