Democratic Mammography Madness

Just to prove that I am an opponent of lunacy no matter its party, I mention here that leading Democrats have been behaving as stupidly over the new mammography recommendations as Republicans. The new guidelines were not even 48 hours old when my esteemed Senator, Barbara Mikulski, introduced an amendment to the pending health care bill that would require insurers to pay for mammograms for women in their 40s. Because while Republicans may be sure that the government is always trying to oppress somebody, Democrats are equally sure that insurance companies are always trying to cheat somebody. Both parties seem to think that everybody should have all the health care he or she wants, damn the expense and the potential harm, with the money to appear magically from somewhere.

Here is a typical reaction from a breast cancer lobbyist in Maryland, as quoted in the Baltimore Sun:

What people are worried about is the one case where you wouldn't catch a cancer, and that results in someone's loss of life -- and that's real.

The science that shows this would do not good is not real, I suppose.

The one intelligent thing said by anyone the Sun interviewed was that even though our diagnostic technology is not good enough now to make this work now, it is getting better all the time. True. And when it gets good enough for routine screening of women in their 40s to save lives, we can start recommending it.

The one good thing about this brouhaha is that it has probably made a lot more women aware of the USPSTF recommendation, which has been the same since the 1970s. And since all the women I know hate getting mammograms, millions of women will probably use these guidelines as an excuse to avoid getting the mammograms they dread. We will thus save a lot of money and avoid a lot of needless harm despite what the American Cancer Society and Congress say.