Rob Sand Meets with Seniors, Cancer Survivors, and Health Care Professionals on “Iowa for All” Tour

DES MOINES, IA – This week, candidate for governor Rob Sand continued his statewide “Iowa for All” tour, visiting the Edgewater Senior Living facility in West Des Moines for a town hall with residents, to tour the facility, and discuss his plan to end Iowa’s failed Medicaid privatization system.

Later, Rob joined cancer patients and survivors, their families, and health care experts for a roundtable discussion on Iowa’s cancer crisis and his plan to tackle it head-on starting on day one. While Rob is focused on expanding access to cancer prevention, treatment, and research, his opponent has called for banning some of the most promising cancer treatments on the market and worked as a paid political operative to block Medicaid expansion.

Learn more about Rob’s recent “Iowa for All” tour stops below:

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WHO13: Rob Sand stops at Edgewater, a WesleyLife Community for Healthy Living

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Radio Iowa: Sand says Iowa needs ‘to get to work’ on reducing cancer rates

Democrat Rob Sand says if he’s elected governor, he’ll appoint a Cancer Task Force, support more research to identify the causes of Iowa’s high cancer rates, and push to improve Iowa’s water quality.
Sand met today with a group of doctors and parents whose children have been diagnosed with cancer. Sand said Iowa needs to catch up with Nebraska, where the state is spending $4.5 million a year on pediatric cancer research. Sand would also support regional agreements among cancer treatment centers. “If a kid from Florida or Nebraska comes into Iowa to get treatment, but it’s under an agreement that means that Iowa kids can go somewhere else in Florida or Nebraska for their form of cancer that’s treated better there,” Sand said, “then everyone’s winning for that arrangement.”
Nearly all of the participants in the discussion had attended today’s Iowa Cancer Summit. One woman expressed concern [that] cancer treatments for children aren’t getting enough attention because the rates of pediatric cancer aren’t rising as much as cancers diagnosed among adults. Sand said there’s a bipartisan [consensus] around expanding cancer treatment options. He praised the Republican-led Iowa legislature for voting this spring to set aside money exclusively for pediatric cancer research.
“Not only is it a health issue, not only is it an issue for families with kids who get diagnosed with cancer, I actually think that it’s also an economic development issue right now,” Sand told reporters after the event. “I hear from people regularly who are so concerned about it that they wonder whether or not they want to be in Iowa.”