It was too late. In 1993, she died at the age of 40. Her brother, lawyer Mick Fleming, has been fighting for changes ever since Bast made it a dying wish. They had a chance to save her life. They basically killed her.
Most insurers now pay for stem-cell transplants for women with advanced breast cancer.
In fact, said Daniels, the Tufts University ethicist, it's still not clear that stem-cell transplants give patients a better shot at survival than conventional therapy. But even people who don't want to pay more for insurance premiums, and who believe there should be limits on health care, gain a different view when they get sick. When they're dying, they often want any treatment possible, even if there's only a tiny chance of success, even if the procedure doesn't fall neatly into insurance coverage. But if it only works 2 percent of the time, that sounds pretty good, too, if it's your only shot.