Government Health Care and Breasts: Do You Get It Now?

In a stunning example of things to come under the proposed Obamacare legislation, a government/medical task force has concluded that women under the age of 50 do not need mammograms, nor should they be taught how to do a self examination of their breasts. Such things are worthless and too costly.

Is there any more blaring example of what government will do to our healthcare? Can you imagine over 130 government bureaucracies determining not only whether women should receive breast exams, but whether men should get PSA exams, or prostate exams, or whether colonoscopies are necessary under the age of seventy; then to have these decisions enforced by coercion directed at what will be left of the private insurance industry, and be outright refused if you are under a “public option” plan.

Sarah Palin warned about death panels. People laughed. This is what she was referring to; panels of bureaucrats, sitting around looking at statistics and cost effectiveness of procedures. Who is too old for a hip replacement? Who is too old for cancer medicine? Lives saved from mammograms as a percentage of women aged 30 – 40 is not worth the expense of paying for them. Do you get it now?

According the government panel studying the cost effectivness of mammograms, they produce too many false alarms in women under 50. My question is, what about the ones that don’t? Those women would be dead. The study is framed in terms that mammograms cause more bad than good with unneeded biopsies. What they really mean is that the expense of the false alarms doesn’t outweigh the lives saved by the procedures.

Who determines where that line is drawn? Are 10% of the biopsies being positive sufficient to justify the mammograms? Is it 30%? Is it 50%? Who is the judge? Appointed bureaucrats with no political responsibility to anybody are the judges. Let me introduce you to the death panels.

Here is what the American Cancer Society said in response: "The task force advice is based on its conclusion that screening 1,300 women in their 50s to save one life is worth it, but that screening 1,900 women in their 40s to save a life is not. (They are) essentially telling women that mammography at age 40 to 49 saves lives, just not enough of them."

This is just a taste of what is to come if government starts to dictate what constitutes our health care. America…beware!!!