Here’s how the LA Times summarized it:
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has recommended against regular mammograms for women under the age of 50 — and to say that this recommendation was not universally endorsed or warmly received would be an understatement.
The attacks on the new policy are not coming only from right-leaning groups either. The American Cancer Society, National Cancer Institute, and the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology have all voiced concerns with the new recommendations.
Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was diagnosed with breast cancer at 41. Here’s what she had to say about the new recommendations:
-Kathleen Reardon said this in an essay on the Huffington post:
“I’d be dead by now if it weren’t for breast self-examination. And had my doctor been less convinced of his own guidelines regarding women without a known history of breast cancer, my cancer would have been detected earlier and I would have been treated sooner and less aggressively. I was 32 years old.”
-Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey, a practicing obstetrician and gynecologist of 26 years, had this to say:
“I absolutely believe this could be a form of rationing…It scares me.”
If the task force was paying special attention to the financial aspect of breast cancer, their conclusion still wouldn’t make sense according to Dr. Cynara Coomer, a professor of surgery at Mt. Sinai’s Surgical Oncology Department in New York.
“… the argument that this is saving cost is sort of irrelevant because if we end up finding cancers at later stages, those women have to go much more aggressive treatment…
Coomer believes that these sorts of recommendations could potentially pave the way for rationing:
“The government-run insurance companies are definitely going to be using these federal guidelines as opposed to using the American Cancer Society guidelines, and the American Cancer Society is not going along with these guidelines, and we can only hope that the private insurance companies don’t follow suit.”