Screening for Cancer
Having barely digested the U.S. Preventive Services Task Forces’ suggestion that women between 40 and 50 years of age don’t need mammograms, American women now have to deal with the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists’ recommendation that they don’t need Pap smears until they turn 21. But at least ACOG resisted the USPSTF’s recommendation to delay mammograms until age 50!
Other well-informed observers (including Linda Gorman and the Wall Street Journal) saw the recommendation to reduce mammography as a harbinger of rationing to come under ObamaCare. It didn’t take long for the counter-attack: The New York Times’ Kevin Sacks “reported” that “the backers of science-driven medicine….. have cheered the elevation of data in the setting of standards,” and the editorial board sternly warns us that the new recommendation is a guideline, and that it should not figure in the debate on health care. Right: A federal task force issues recommendations contrary to those of the American Cancer Society and other medical groups, and we’re not supposed to worry that once the federal government takes over everyone’s access to health insurance, it’s preferences won’t prevail?
The New York Times also ran an op-ed by Dr. Robert Aronowitz, who proclaimed that American women and their physicians are “addicted to mammograms”! Dr. Aronowitz traces the source of this “addiction” back to the 1870s, and notes that breast-cancer mortality barely budged from 1950 to 1990. That’s an interesting stop-point. According to the American Cancer Society (p. 8), significant declines in breast-cancer mortality occurred after 1990, and it mostly happened in younger women – the ones that the USPSTF doesn’t want screened anymore.
Dr. Aronowitz comes close to suggesting that our modern understanding of breast cancer is the result of a 19th century patriarchal power structure of which we should be rid. What’s next, will the New York Times run an op-ed by a post-modernist philosopher arguing that breast cancer is a “social construct,” like gender itself?
Handwriting is on the wall. Our health care is going to be rationed. Isn’t it Obvious?
I agree with Nancy. It’s no accident that these guidelines are coming out just at the time that the left is trying to push a health reform bill through Congress.
I believe the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is cited many times in the Reid bill as the entity that will determine what minimal coverage people will be required to have. If they decide you don’t need something, odds are your insurance plan is not going to pay for it.
And so it goes when government controls healthcare. We will go from worst to first in record timing and will hear nothing but positive results and outcomes within our healthcare system. Of course, none of it will be true. Just like now when the sycophants publish “research” that demonstrates how God awful our healthcare system is. They purposely choose variables to measure that do show a certain weakness but which are non-sequiturs as measurement of quality of our medical care.
I’m the first to admit that I know nothing about who should get a mammogram or a pap smear.
But instead of trusting the government to decide when we should get cancer screenings, why not empower people and doctors to become informed and make their own decisions?
What’s next? Is the government going to start deciding whether a minivan or Mercedes is the best car for your family? Perhaps we need a government board to dictate what type of cellphones to use (to avoid buying a phone that has too many unneeded features).