Decline in state's tobacco tax may spell end for breast cancer screening program

Jan. 17, 2010 | By KPCC Wire Services | KPCC

REDONDO BEACH — A falloff in revenue from California's tobacco tax is threatening to scuttle a breast cancer screening program that benefited 311,000 women a year, it was reported today.

The Harbor-UCLA Medical Foundation program uses specially-trained student doctors to read mammograms sent in by outreach groups across California, and Sacramento abruptly cut funding last month, the Daily Breeze reported.

The federal government contributes funds to the $61 million program, money that will be lost if the state contribution is cancelled, the newspaper said.

Health advocates and Democratic legislators have decried the cuts as shortsighted.

"Down the road, I can tell you this is going to cost a lot of lives,'' Silvia Owen, director of the Encore Plus Program at the YWCA in San Pedro, told the Daily Breeze. The program screens about 2,000 women a year.

State Sen. Jenny Oropeza, D-Redondo Beach, introduced emergency legislation last week that would restore funding for the program. The bill, SB 836, would require a two-thirds vote to pass but would take effective immediately.

Officials at local health clinics told the newspaper far fewer women are coming out to screening events. South Bay resident Debora Wright, who runs the state's largest mobile mammography service in collaboration with the clinics, said she is struggling to find work for her radiologists.

"We got absolutely no notice that this (cut) was going to happen,'' said Wrights, who runs Inner Images Inc., a nonprofit based in Torrance that screens about 7,500 women a year from Sacramento to San Diego.

"These are lives we're talking about,'' she told the Daily Breeze. "These are women who are not being screened."

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