GOP Candidate, Chris Collins, Clarifies Cancer Comment

In another triumph of stupidity versus common sense a GOP candidate for Congress, Chris Collins, is being accused of a major gaffe when he claimed that “people now don’t die” of prostate cancer and breast cancer. In a case of a comment widely being taken out of context, Collins is being forced to defend his own knowledge that people still die from these diseases instead of talking about the issues in New York.

Collins made the gaffe in reference to President Obama’s signature health care act, dubbed Obamacare. He made the comments to stress how the great advances made in cancer treatments have kept a lot of people alive who would have died ten years ago, and also show the dramatic increase in costs for these treatments.

Collins told the Batavian,

“The result is we live a lot longer and people today are surviving where they may not have a decade ago. Clearly, I’m not a politician. I come out of the private sector. I speak very directly. I actually answer questions. I’m not someone who filters, who is consistently filtering everything you say.”

Collins is trying to unseat Democratic Representative Kathy Hochul who won her seat in a special election in May 2011. She had a different take on Collins remarks saying,

“He said it was out of context. It looked like it read in context to me… If you’re going to engage in this level of debate and criticize health policy that provides care to people with preexisting conditions, if you want to have these conversations, it’s important to state your position clearly.”

Hochul said that she believed President Obama’s healthcare bill isn’t perfect but the country has way more pressing concerns that revisiting Obamacare.

Hochul said during a Town Hall meeting,

“There’s a lot of uncertainty about this, but it is now the law of the land and they understand that, and we don’t want to take this country backward and re-litigate and re-fight over this. We’ve got a lot of other issues to deal with.”