Keeping A Breast & Saving Lives
The release of the U.S Preventive Services Task Force's recommendation to curtail routine annual mammogram screenings for breast cancer is terrible news for nearly everyone--except the insurance companies. Eliminating annual screening for women in their 40s and making screening every other year for women in their 50s is ill-conceived and ill-considered. Thousands of women will die needlessly. Many will die directly because their cancers were not found early, and more will likely die because this is a cultural change.
Many women who have been taught to have annual mammograms will not think it is as important. If it can wait a year--or for women in their 40s, a decade--why not skip another year?
Since the institution of regular, which is to say, annual mammograms, the death rate from breast cancer has fallen 30%. Some of this is due to better treatment, but you can't treat what you haven't found and diagnosed.
The spokesperson for the panel said that they were charged only to look at numbers and effectiveness and not to consider cost or insurance. This is a tragic and cruel error of both logic and morality. Women are not numbers, and policy recommendations have profound consequences--life and death consequences. With an official, if not directly governmental, panel saying that annual mammograms are not effective--or not effective enough--you know, and they should know, that insurance companies will fight assiduously to eliminate coverage. Why pay, after all, if it doesn't save (enough) lives?
This is a gift to those opposed to true health care reform. This is a panel that dealing only in numbers and not seeing the lives of women, releases its recommendations blind to the consequences of their report. Thinking like actuaries and not human beings, while denying that they essentially did a cost benefit analysis (which is what they did) they decided that detecting one cancer out of 1,300 tests (women in their 50s) was worth doing, but that detecting one cancer out of 1,800 tests (women in their 40s) was not. Tell that to their faces or through the tears of their husbands, partners, children and parents.
©2009 Jonathan Dobrer
www.Dobrer.com
Okay I am really not trying to pick a fight here, but there really is such a thing as the point of diminishing returns. I don't know if the statistics you point to, above, are accurate, but assuming they are, 1 out of 1300 IS more valuable than 1 out of 1800... what I mean to say is, if we did mammograms throughout the 30s, it would no doubt save even more lives, right? I don't know, I'm totally guessing, say, 1 out of 3500... then women in their 20s (it has been known to happen), 1 out of 50,000 ??? Tell that to the faces or through the tears of that young woman's partner, children, parents. Truth is, MOST women are not going to get breast cancer. Maybe nobody should ever get a mammogram. Who gets to crunch and decide these numbers? Which brings us to...
How by immediately putting the onus on the insurance companies, you miss the very valid point that this government report is just one of many new ones we will no doubt here about, letting us all know that it's perfectly safe to forego tests/procedures/lifestyle choices that we previously were told were important. That's how to peacefully smooth the transition to rationed care, Jonathan. Already millions of women are breathing a sigh of relief that they don't have to go get a damn mammomgram, which is a pain in the ... well, boob.