Health Care: Unraveling The Cancer-Poverty Connection

Great story of "The American Spirit" on the CBS Evening News tonight . . . . . . . . .

(CBS) As the chief surgical resident at the prestigious Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Dr. Harold Freeman could have written his own ticket, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric reports. Instead, he decided to set up shop at Harlem Hospital in 1967.

"It was a very big shock for me," he said, because all of his training was suddenly useless for so many of his cancer patients. It was simply too late.

"Half of the women at Harlem Hospital were incurable when they walked into the doors of the hospital," Freeman says. "The thing they had in common was that they were poor."

It was then that he began to try to unravel the connection between cancer, race and poverty.

"Poverty should not be an offense that is punishable by death."

Read the entire story here.