Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Signs Legislation Making Life-saving Medical Care More Affordable and Accessible for New Yorkers

Governor Kathy Hochul today signed legislation to make life-saving medical care more affordable and accessible for New Yorkers. Legislation S2000A/A1195A requires health insurance policies to provide coverage for follow-up screening or diagnostic services for lung cancer, and prevents insurance policies from imposing cost-sharing for those services. The legislation builds on the Governor’s affordability agenda, which includes a ban on co-pays for critical medications like insulin and inhalers.

VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).

AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.

PHOTOS: The Governor’s Flickr page will post photos of the event here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

 Good afternoon, everyone. It is so great to see all of you on this really momentous occasion. And I first of all want to recognize one of the reasons we're here today is we have a Senate leader who thought it was so important to try to give some sort of a relief valve to families that are struggling with a cancer diagnosis, and to try to save them some money, which is so important to us. So Senator Addabbo, I want to thank you for your leadership here — let's give him another round of applause.

Our Majority Leader of the Assembly, Crystal Peoples-Stokes, is the sponsor in the Assembly. I'm grateful for her work. I know she's very close to our friends at Roswell in Buffalo. Thank you for traveling here as well, and I want to thank her. We have our Commissioner of Health, James McDonald here. Thank you for joining us, Commissioner. As well as our Acting Superintendent of the Department of Financial Services, Kaitlin Asrow. I want to thank Kaitlin for being here as well. And also our representatives from the American Lung Cancer Society — you'll be hearing from them momentarily; as well as survivors, family members, people who've been through the trauma of a cancer diagnosis — and also from our MSK and Cancer Center in Roswell Park, as I mentioned, are here today.

This is going to be a very significant day in the lives of people who find out the news that they have a cancer diagnosis, especially lung cancer, because it puts you on a long journey. A lot of uncertainty, fear, anxiety, truly an emotional rollercoaster — something my family experienced in this space just earlier this year. So, this is personal. And what we're going to do in a couple minutes is to literally sign a bill that could be the matter of life and death for families because a cancer screening, particularly lung cancer screening, is what gives you a new lease on life. If you get early diagnoses, if you find out early enough, your chance of survival is so high because there are treatments.

We have incredible research institutions here in the State of New York and across this country who are dedicated to this work. And if you get that early diagnosis, your survival rate goes up dramatically. But we have seen that late detection can result in about a 10 percent survival rate. That is the difference, my friends. That is the difference right now. And nearly 14,000 New Yorkers are diagnosed every single year. And across the country, we have about 7,000 whose lives perish. So in New York — you've heard me say this often — health is everything. Your health is everything. And if your family can be spared the expense of having to come up with — maybe it's a $50 copay, but it could literally be hundreds or thousands of dollars depending on the cost involved.

And so, having that money back in your pocket, or not deferring going for a screening — this is going to be so significant to people, and I'm going to make sure that people know. We're going to keep fighting to make sure that we have high quality health care available to people, and that is a fight we're taking on with Washington. It feels like every single day that they don't care about people, or else why would they be talking about cutting Medicaid? Which is a lifeline for people to know that they can take care of themselves or their families if there is a diagnosis like lung cancer — that they'll have the care they need, the coverage they need. Why would they even be toying with that? Why would they be increasing the premiums for people to purchase health care under the Affordable Care Act so dramatically?

There's this sense of, “Who are you fighting for?” And here in New York, I know who we're fighting for. We're fighting for everyday New Yorkers who sometimes get a twist of fate in their lives and find out that they're going to need very expensive treatments and a journey before they can recover their health — and those are the people we care about. And I wish Washington and our representatives in Washington, particularly those who represent this state, would give a damn about them as well.

Everybody in this room cares, but I'm not sure how to explain the behavior and the actions of people who are so, so cruel and discompassionate that they would strip this away. So here in New York, we're showing what we're doing today. This is another sign that we can call upon our insurers and, in fact, demand our insurance companies to do what is right to lift this burden of expense for lifesaving lung cancer screenings from the patients, because my God, they have enough to worry about. And if we can do that — and we will be doing that very shortly — then we'll know and be reminded of who we're fighting for and why we do what we do in our daily lives.

And so, I thank everyone. I want to thank the Institutes of Health and National Cancer Institutes because they're out there fighting on front lines in Washington, and they're being stripped away of essential funding. So we think about where the next innovations are coming from, where are the therapies coming from, where are the ideas coming from? We don't even have fully funded Institutes of Health because again, this cavalier, depraved attitude about people's health in Washington that we know we have more to do here in New York, that we have to make up for this, that we have to find pathways to find these cures and therapies in our own state.

So we're going to keep that focus. And right now, I want to call up the sponsor of this bill. I look forward to signing this and just telling him how grateful I am. This is something that no one ever expects this to happen. You wake up one day and everything's fine. The next day, you go for a screening, or some diagnosis or some sign that something's not right, and your life can turn upside down. As I said, it's something that we just came through in my own life, my own family's life. So, I'm there for you.

Let's bring up the sponsor in this bill, Senator Addabbo, and thank him again for his leadership.