I AM responding to the physician whose letter proclaimed that CT scans were a proven waste of resources in screening for lung cancer (“State’s high court oversteps in ruling on cancer screenings,’’ Letters, Oct. 24). I am assuming that his mother did not die of lung cancer 35 years after she had quit smoking. Kara Kennedy would probably not be alive today except that her cancer was caught on a routine X-ray.
Many lives are saved by CT scans, but often the underlying message is that smokers deserve their cancer. Many people who die of lung cancer quit decades earlier and believed what we were told then; that the risk of lung cancer goes down to that of a nonsmoker. We now know that is not true.
Insurance companies have no investment in diagnosing lung cancer earlier; without earlier detection, their patients will simply die, most within six months.
Anyone who has lost someone to lung cancer knows that by the time symptoms appear, it is usually too late. Paying for smokers’ lung cancer screenings, per ruling of the state Supreme Judicial Court, is the least
Patricia Hunt
Newtonville 
