Is McCain A Lot Sicker Than We Know?

In the crucial final weeks of the campaign John McCain is mostly doing only one event a day. This is the man of whom his primary care physician at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, said to journalists in a conference call last May 23: “At the present time, Sen. McCain enjoys excellent health and displays extraordinary energy.” He looked tired and sick in the second debate in Nashville. As Sarah Palin rabble-rouses the crowds with calls for Obama to be forthright, she may be wondering, “how forthright has John McCain been with me? If he wins on November 4, will I be president in six months or a year?”

But if McCain’s battle with melanoma has suddenly turned critical, wouldn’t his doctors feel compelled to divulge their knowledge about the candidate? The answer is No. The legal penalties under HIPPA (the medical privacy act) for disclosure of protected health information, without that patient’s consent, are extremely serious.

No one is more under day-to-day scrutiny than the President. When Reagan ran for re-election he already knew he had colon cancer and that was kept quiet until after he won. In health matters, secrecy often wins out in the political crunch. What follows are the essentials of a story by Fred Gardner and myself in the latest issue of our CounterPunch newsletter.

In the past fifteen years, John McCain has had four melanomas removed. The most dangerous was the one taken from his temple in 2000, classified by his doctors as an invasive melanoma, stage IIA, on a standard scale that makes stage IV the most serious.

The 2000 surgery left McCain not only with a puffy jaw but also with a scar down his neck. Dr Eckstein’s public statement, released May 24 of this year, stated: