Oklahoma Cancer treatment bill signed.

2004 JUN 3 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Oklahoma is no longer the only state in the nation to shun a program that uses federal Medicaid money for screening and treatment of women with breast and cervical cancer.

Governor Brad Henry signed into law a bill creating the Belle Maxine Hilliard Breast and Cervical Cancer Treatment Fund.

"This law is long overdue and desperately needed," Henry said. "Too many Oklahoma women have succumbed to these diseases because they couldn't afford a mammogram, much less the cost of treatment if they were diagnosed. This bill will undoubtedly save lives."

Representative Danny Hilliard, D-Sulphur, was principal author of the measure, which was named in a Senate committee for his mother, a cafeteria worker in the Sulphur Public Schools. She died in 1990 of breast cancer.

Hilliard, speaker pro tem of the House, said he learned on the day that he announced for the House that treatment on his mother had failed.

He said he immediately wrote a letter resigning from the race, but was talked out of mailing it by his mother and his wife, Karen, who attended the ceremony.

"I believe in guardian angels. It's not just by happenstance that this has happened in the twilight of my legislative career," said Hilliard, who will go out of office this year because of a term limit law passed by voters in 1990.