Boobs in Health Care Debate

I really do try to be bipartisan and not use my reach to over 40,000 unique readers for political purposes, but felt compelled to write about this issue. I had my first mammogram last year. My aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer in her thirties so my physician thought it best for me to have  this procedure. All was well, and I was told that it’s important to have a mammogram in your thirties so that you have a baseline from which the doctors can work.

Recently, a new recommendation came out by the United States Preventive Services Task Force, a government-appointed group of 16 outside experts created 25 years ago to advise the Department of Health and Human Services on the effectiveness of various screening techniques. The panel set out to determine whether mammograms do more good than harm for women of various ages. The panel recommended that women in their forties should NOT have mammograms and that women between ages 50 and 74 should have them, but only every two years rather than annually.

Those of you in your early twenties who still have that feeling of being invincible and having control over your entire life may not see this as a big deal, but it is. With government-run health care, we would likely have these so-called experts making decisions for government health care and deciding what procedures we are allowed to have. Why does this matter? According to Ashton Lattimore at NewsOne:

Black women, writes Lattimore, “have the highest breast cancer death rate of any race, are at increased risk for developing the diseases at younger ages, and are disproportionately prone to an extremely aggressive form of breast cancer” known as “triple negative,” which can move fast enough to progress beyond stage 1 in between annual screenings, let alone biannual ones. Additionally, African-American women “already receive fewer mammograms than white women,” are more likely to be diagnosed at later stages and less likely to receive the appropriate follow-up care. Moreover, “the U.S. Department of Health reports that Black women ages 35 to 44 have a breast cancer death rate more than twice that of white women in the same age group.”

So in effect, the government would be rationing mammograms and selecting which race they want to protect. In this case, it’s hurting African-American women, but the next time it might hurt Latinos, or Asians. The government has no business making these sorts of decisions. Physicians need to make the call. Just like I needed a mammogram in my thirties, but most women don’t. We are all unique, and as we know from fashion, one-size-fits-all is not cute! Some of you might prefer that I blog about fashion, dating, or drama in my life, but we all need to wake up and pay attention to what is going on right now with the health care debate. If you are against government-run health care, don’t just complain, pick up the phone, or email your Congressman. Unless you take action, you really have no right to complain later. This isn’t Republican vs. Democrat — it’s what’s right for women and families. Free sounds good, but you get what you pay for, and there is always a cost whether or not that cost is in money — or lives.

- Miss A