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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's cancer surgery was covered by all three network's Supreme Court watchers; ABC and CBS also consulted their in-house physicians for a prognosis. CBS' Jon Lapook characterized himself as "cautiously optimistic--because this is not your typical pancreatic cancer, which is usually found late." In Bader Ginsburg's case, the one-centimeter tumor was detected by CT scan during her annual checkup. She was suffering no symptoms but was undergoing the screening because she had been a colon cancer patient. "We can say that this cancer ten years ago may have saved her life now," opined ABC's Timothy Johnson (as part of the Jan Crawford Greenburg videostream).
CBS' Wyatt Andrews gave us a brief Bader Ginsburg bio: 75 years old, appointed in 1993, the Court's only woman, "champion for women's and individual rights." ABC's Crawford Greenberg reminded us of a speech the Justice gave last year in which "she saw herself as being on this Court until her late eighties." NBC's Pete Williams reported that her "model for service" is Justice John Paul Stevens "now in his 35th year on the Court."
Later in the newscast, CBS' LaPook filed an Eye on Your Health feature about cancer patients who are not as fortunate as the Supreme Court Justice. Bader Ginsburg got her annual physical at the National Institutes for Health and her tumor surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering. LaPook countered with the Kaiser Family Foundation's estimate that there are one million cancer patients nationwide who do not receive proper medical treatment for their disease. Even those who have health insurance can be undercovered for a course of treatment that can range from $2,000 to $7,000 per patient per month. The prognosis--premature death or survival stripped of life savings.
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