DATE: Friday, March 14, 1997                TAG: 9703140617

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A16  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY DALE EISMAN, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: WASHINGTON                        LENGTH:   77 lines

LAWMAKER USES OWN EXPERIENCE TO URGE MEDICARE CANCER TESTING CONGRESSMAN SAYS AN UNCOMFORTABLE, BUT SIMPLE, TEST SAVED HIS LIFE.

As a millionaire businessman and member of Congress, Rep. Norman Sisisky has some of the most sophisticated medical care in the world within easy grasp.

But a simple, if uncomfortable, test saved his life 19 months ago, the veteran Hampton Roads congressman told a House subcommittee Thursday, and launched him on a mission ``to do everything I can to help other people'' beat colorectal cancer.

Cancer-free since doctors removed part of his colon and put him on chemotherapy for a year, Sisisky wants Congress to have Medicare cover the cost of barium enema tests for senior citizens judged - as he was - at high risk for the disease.

Legislation already pending in the House Ways and Means Committee would provide Medicare coverage for an annual fecal-occult blood test and a flexible sigmoidoscopy once every four years for Americans over 50.

The bill also would extend Medicare coverage to a variety of other preventative medical procedures, including annual mammograms for women over 49, annual prostate cancer screening for men 50 and older, and testing strips used to monitor blood sugar in patients with diabetes.

The fecal-occult test for colorectal cancer is a simple, painless procedure in which the patient supplies swabs from stool samples to a lab for testing. The sigmoidoscope is a probe used by physicians to examine the lower portion of a patient's colon.

With colorectal cancer spreading at a rate of more than 100,000 new cases annually, proponents of the legislation say such tests could reveal the disease to thousands of people while it can still be treated relatively easily and cheaply.

The worth of such screening is so clear, ``I'm almost surprised that they're even debating it,'' Dr. Stephen Caplan, a Hampton Roads gastroenterologist, said in a telephone interview. ``We have an epidemic of cancer of the colon in this country.''

Sisisky voiced similar sentiments, but argued that the bipartisan initiative, whose supporters include President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich, should go further to include the barium enema for high-risk patients. For that test, a special fluid is injected into the colon and the patient is X-rayed.

Sisisky scoffed at suggestions that some doctors might order the test unnecessarily, running up costs, and at the bill's provisions for a two-year study of the issue.

``I have had the barium test. Believe me when I tell you, there is nothing pleasant about this test,'' Sisisky assured his colleagues. ``There is no doctor, anywhere, who would prescribe this test for a patient if he or she knew it was not absolutely necessary.''

Along with his own testimony, Sisisky gave the subcommittee a written statement from former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, who in January led a Virginia Commonwealth University symposium that examined the particular threat colorectal cancer poses to African-Americans.

African-Americans who get the disease are 50 percent more likely to die than other patients, Wilder said, and a National Cancer Institute Study found that African-Americans have a greater tendency than whites to develop the disease in the right colon, where only the barium enema reveals it.

Though support for the more limited provisions already in the bill is widespread, subcommittee chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif., noted that such strong backing has not been enough to get the bill through Congress in past years. With Congress also trying to balance the federal budget, Congressional Budget Office estimates that colorectal screening could cost up to $200 million per year have proven a major stumbling block to the legislation.

Gingrich argued Thursday that those estimates are ``simply wrong'' and ``anti-human.'' Early detection of the diseases covered by the legislation would end up saving taxpayers' money, he said.

In Hampton Roads alone, 200 Medicare beneficiaries were admitted to hospitals in 1995 for conditions related to cancerous colons. Their treatment cost the federal government about $2.2 million in inpatient costs. MEMO: Staff writer Debra Gordon contributed to this report. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

Rep. Norman Sisisky, who is now cancer-free, is on a mission ``to do

everything I can to help other people'' beat colorectal cancer.

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