Cutting health care costs 1 mammogram and Pap smear at a time

It always shocks me whenever people put money before everything else: the woman who marries the ancient millionaire out of greed, the farmer in India who puts his wife up for sale, the girls who get sold into slavery with known ends, or the parents whose kids don’t recognize them because they are always in the office. These are personal affronts on others. What gets sickening is governments adopting equally harmful, and even deadly, affronts on human life.

Recently, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) decided to recommend cutting back on mammograms. Not that it matters that the US is now at the forefront of breast cancer survival in the world. This due recognition is credited to screening. Well, now that we have reached this height in survival, we should cut back, right? Like the rabbit that out-ran the tortoise at first, we are deciding to take a nap instead of keeping pace. While we are napping, women are dying.

Since 1990, mortality from breast cancer has dropped 30%. We have made great advances in preventing women’s deaths. In 2002, the USPSTF recommended that women as young as 40 begin receiving mammograms. Mammograms also needed to be administered every year. But, apparently they are now fickle and have now decided that, to cut costs, mammograms should only be given every other year to women ages 50-74.

Oh! But, they redeemed themselves. Women “most at risk” will have exceptions to this rule. What the heck does that mean? Who is deemed most at risk? Those who end up with breast cancer most often, after all, are those who have no detectable risk factors and no family history. Women in their 40s have the most aggressive forms of breast cancer. They also have a higher death risk. These women will no longer have the option of treatment to balance these increased risks. They will die.

Support for this cut back in screening comes from those who say there is more harm than good in early and frequent testing. After all, this will decrease false positives, because no one will have to option to read positive. This will also cut back on overtreating cancers which are not as dangerous as tests show. Now, there will be no option to treat at all; we move from overtreatment to zero treatment.

The last reason for women to get happy about this is that they will no longer have to suffer under the discomfort of the exam. Are you serious? One of the positives to limiting screening was stated as taking away the discomfort of the exam! I think that if you ask any woman who has had breast cancer if she would have refused to undergo the exam and be blissfully ignorant of her cancer, and dead now, or if she is glad to have been treated, the answer will always be the same: glad to be alive.

Why the sudden change from prevention to hands-off? Health care, or, as some put it “ObamaCare.” With the government preparing to be in charge of all our health care costs, concerns about cutting costs have risen. Apparently, fears about the government not being able to handle the costs or the pressure of taking care of all of us need to resurface. If they can’t pay for mammograms, what else can’t they pay for? How many have to die before we realize the errors of not testing? We are cashing in lives to save money.

Medicare could adopt this policy now, further limiting the health care that America’s poor receive. So, we are targeting the women and the poor, which are historically and internationally the most disadvantaged. The United Nations is trying to fight for the rights of the women of the world as the US is trying to take them away from their citizens.

Another cutback in costs is in Pap smears. Again, overtreatment is seen to be more of an issue by the government than treatment, period. Pap smears are going to be offered every other year instead of every year and younger women are going to stop undergoing testing.

What other procedures are going to be cut next? How many other crucial and potentially life-saving tests are too expensive for ObamaCare to take care of? I also find it ironic, as one blogger pointed out, that our government is fighting to take away funds from tests that save lives while fighting to fund one that kills: abortion.

Colleen is a graduate student.