QWhether it’s talking about sexual assault or recognizing long-hidden ailments like endometriosis, transparency often liberates. It can also weaken. This is the case for cancer patients. Job search, loan, insurance: the citizen is constantly confronted with the illness he has gone through, as if cancer were casting a shadow over his existence in perpetuity.
This is why in 2017 RoseUp, our association, argued in favor of a law on the right to be forgotten for former patients. Emmanuel Macron, then a candidate for the presidential election, made it a campaign promise: to establish, after the end of cancer treatment, this right to be forgotten. Unfortunately, from renunciations to palinodies, this commitment has so far not been honored. There remains a chance if, on the legislative thread, the amendment presented by the parliamentarians Les Républicains (LR) and Socialists (PS) on January 26 in the Senate is adopted.
What are we talking about ? Precisely the right to conceal his medical past. The right not to be a victim for life. Until 2016, all ex-patients had to declare their past cancer to the insurer up to twenty years after the end of treatment. With, as a watermark, this idea that we never cured it. That we remained on borrowed time. And that one therefore had to overpay monstrous insurance premiums to borrow money. In order to better regulate this market, the Aeras convention (“insure and borrow with an aggravated health risk”), following the convention Belorgey, of 2001, was signed in 2006 between banking and insurance professionals, associations and public authorities.
But, in this conventional process, the insurers played for time in order above all not to “let go” of the enormous profits generated by these tens of thousands of massively overpriced policyholders. This was also the diagnosis of the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs, which concluded a report of May 2015: “These bodies have not led to any concrete progress” in fourteen years. In 2016, the legislation on the right to be forgotten, by increasing from twenty to ten years (five years for young people under 21) the waiting period necessary before no longer reporting cancer, thus unblocked a situation bogged down for fifteen years.
What science tells us today is that the vast majority of cancers, if they have not recurred five years after the end of treatment, are cured. To say that you are cured is to resume a normal life. Buy an apartment. Start a business. To live without being haunted by the ghost of a disease that we have conquered. To be an “equal” citizen.
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