Rationing Now On The Menu
Friday, November 20, 2009 at 05:42PM Being a woman is never an easy thing. For all the reasons that I don’t need to quote here.
It’s getting more difficult lately.
While everyone has been talking about the hidden dangers of rationing for the elderly and terminally ill in the current healthcare plan being touted by Congress - a backdoor has been thrown wide open. That of targeting preventive screenings for women.
Earlier this week it was about pushing for mammograms after age 50, rather than the standard of age 40. According to a new study by the US Preventive Service Task Force:
The United States Preventive Service Task Force announced Monday that it recommends against annual mammograms for women age 40 to 49 because, they say, the benefits of testing do not outweigh the "harms" and risks.
…
The task force also recommends against teaching breast self-exams for all women and said evidence was insufficient to recommend mammograms for women older than 74.
I read earlier this week (and I can’t remember where nor can I find the link, sorry…) that just 6 months ago this same Task Force went publicly apoplectic at a 1% drop in mammograms in women over 40. Yet now they recommend waiting another decade.
The statistic is that 1 out of every 8 women will get breast cancer in her lifetime. When I look around my group of close female friends and apply this statistic, at least one of us will get that diagnosis. According to the American Society of Breast Disease:
For most women, predicting breast cancer risk on the basis of possible risk factors can be unreliable. Fully 70 percent of all women diagnosed with breast cancer had no known risk before the time of diagnosis. . . . To advise women age 40 and older to skip annual screening because they have no family history of the disease is imprudent, irresponsible and places their lives at unnecessary jeopardy."
Now we get pushback on screenings for cervical cancer:
Women in the United States should start cervical cancer screening at age 21 and most do not need an annual Pap smear, according to new guidelines issued Friday that aim to reduce the risk of unnecessary treatment.
According to new studies the risk of cervical cancer in young women under 21 is extremely low. In fact, according to the same article this new recommendation is in complete contravention to statistics about cases of cervical cancer:
In the past 30 years, cervical cancer rates in the United States have fallen by more than half, due in large part to widespread use of cervical cancer screening.
So for cervical cancer screening changes, tell that to my friend Lisa who was diagnosed with cervical cancer at age 20. She had routine pap smears since she was about 17. Contrary to the information quoted above, they were all normal until she was 20. She’s had 2 recurrences of the cancer since then. Thankfully Lisa has gone on to live a normal life; she even has a child of her own. By these new screening standards, Lisa would be dead today – the cancer gone too far by the time she was 21.
Of the women I know who have had or are battling breast cancer – all were in their late 30s/early 40s when it was diagnosed. Another, a family member, was 78 when she was diagnosed. No family history of the disease for any of them.
By these new mammography standards – they would all be dead today.
These are all vibrant women with families and futures. With a disease that is treatable and in some cases curable with early detection through preventive screenings and testing.
I am 46 years old and have never had children. I have been told by a friend who works as a director of a palliative care clinic that statistics say that I am 60 times more likely to get breast cancer than a woman who has had children. According to these new screening standards I shouldn’t get another mammogram for 4 years. During which time I could fall into that statistic unknowingly, with treatment coming too late.
One of the articles above talks about the anxiety caused by mammograms that screen things that, in the end, are too small for a woman to be concerned about – the anxiety of further testing and procedures.
I’d rather face that kind of anxiety with a happy ending, than the anxiety of a diagnosis received too late for any treatment to prevent death.
I read earlier this week (and I can’t remember where nor can I find the link, sorry…) that just 6 months ago this same Task Force went publicly apoplectic at a 1% drop in mammograms in women over 40. Yet now they recommend waiting another decade.
All of which made me stop and wonder…who or what is the US Preventive Services Task Force. The Internet is a beautiful thing:
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research Quality, US Preventive Services Task Force is "an independent panel of experts in primary care and prevention that systematically reviews the evidence of effectiveness and develops recommendations for clinical preventive services." The task force, a panel of experts, is funded and appointed by the government of the United States. [emphasis mine]
How independent can they be when they are appointed, paid for and likely controlled by the government – a government currently trying to ram a damaging and costly healthcare bill down the country’s throat with vastly dwindling support.
So what is this all about then? Money of course. As Congress prepares to unleash their deficit-producing, tax-increasing, vomit-inducing healthcare plan on the nation, they need to find ways to keep costs down so their lies have some kind of tint of truth to them. Reducing expenses for preventive care is one of the ways – and they’ve decided to focus on women’s issues first.
Or let's call this what it really is - the start of healthcare rationing.
Because some dried up prune in Congress – yes, Nancy Pelosi I’m talking about you, a traitor to your sex – is more interested in their precious agenda than in true preventive healthcare that saves lives. How many hundreds of thousands of women, like the ones I’ve known, will go without these screenings because suddenly their insurance (public or private) won’t pay for them and they won’t be able to afford it on their own? How many of them will die because tests were administered too late?
Shame on all these people. I just don’t know what else to say.

