Obama’s breast cancer death-panel…The lizards are NOT here to help us, people…
I have a small window of time right now to blog for a bit, and I’m going to take this opportunity to comment on something very important. For starters, consider this, from ABC’s report on the Barbara Walters/Sarah Palin interview:
[Sarah Palin] scored a major blow to Obama in August when she wrote on her Facebook page that under Obama’s plans, the fate of the elderly and her son Trigg, who has Down syndrome, would be determined by “death panels.” In his address to the joint session of Congress, the president lashed out at the charge, made by Palin and others, calling it “a lie, plain and simple.”
When asked by [Barbara]Walters if it was Obama who was lying, Palin said: “He is not lying, in that those two words will not be found in any of those thousands of pages of different variations of the health care bill. No, ‘death panel’ isn’t there. But he’s incorrect, and he is disingenuous.”
I will be less kind than Sarah; Obama is a lying lizard, and he is not here to help you.
On most mornings, I wake up with one of the leading breast cancer experts in the country, a real pioneer in the field of modern breast imaging. We had a pretty good night last night (our poor ailing dog is on a new sedative that totally knocks him out for the night, so that we all can sleep), so when the clock radio went off this morning, we could actually hear the news, instead of just reacting to the sudden noise like frat kids with hangovers (as has been the case over these many weeks of veterinary emergency).
The first item featured various pundits trashing Sarah Palin, of course, that idiot rube from the hinterlands who accused our messianic leader Obamalinsky of creating “death panels.” Then weather update, traffic, and then they got to the fascinating new report by the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF), recommending that women ages 40-49 should NOT routinely have mammograms, that women should NOT be taught or encouraged to do self-exams, and that we shouldn’t bother with mammograms for women over the age of 74. Oh, and women between the ages of 50-74 should cut back on those annual mammograms and just do them every other year.
Now, it takes me a while to become polite and genteel first thing in the morning, so when I heard this, I reached over and lightly backhanded the royal consort on the buttocks and said, “Yo doc, wtf is wrong with self-exams? Why would Obamalinsky want to discourage that….for Pete’s sake, there are Boy Scouts out there offering to do it for free! This makes no sense.”
12-Year-Old Boy Scouts Volunteer To Give Women Breast Exams
The Doc answered with closed eyes: “Women doing self-exams often find benign lumps.” OK, I said, sounds good. “Yes, it’s wonderful. The problem for government-run medical socialists is that these women won’t know that they are benign until they’ve been biopsied. Which costs money. If you average it all out, most of the lumps are benign, so finding the malignant lump might cost a million dollars….if you average it all out, instead of considering that you have just saved someone’s wife, sister, daughter, mother, lover—a bureaucrat can save a lot of money. The bureaucrats would prefer that these women not find their lumps and then get frightened and go see a doctor. It would cost the government money.”
Naif that I am, I wondered aloud if the same might not be said for every other form of preventative health care…regular check-ups, colonoscopies, screenings for prostate cancer, etc. “Of course,” the Doc said. “If you don’t take those precautions you’re taking your chances, taking your life in your hands. The government has just laid its cards on the table, and put your life in its hands. This USPSTF is a death panel.”
I lay there thinking of all the BMW bumpers I’ve seen in my neighborhood—owned by my PC liberal friends—that are bookended with the requisite Obama sticker on one side, and the pink “breast cancer awareness” ribbon on the other. I would wonder what they are thinking this morning. Except that I already know that they aren’t thinking, because they belong to a cult. Truly disturbing times we live in.
Related: I was listening to Sarah talk to Rush as I typed this, and I was reminded of David Brooks’ snide comment about her being a “talk show host,” and I thought to myself: David, you hate her with such flared-nostril intensity because she’s everything you wish you could be….genuine, interesting, fun, good-looking, and a strong woman. Not that you’re not a woman, David; you’re just not a strong woman. You called her a “cancer on the party.” Interesting choice of words, maggot.
RELATED: Mammograms, shmammograms…Don’t bother your pretty little heads about them….
CM16:
My cousin is a Hematologist/ Oncologist and he was astounded by this as well. He treated two of my friends who both died of breast cancer in their 40’s…
17 November 2009, 4:00 pmStickerShock:
It’s particularly galling because Obama uses the argument that the uninsured underclass is denied preventative care, and that’s the great American tragedy his healthcare plan will fix. Remember that embarrassingly incoherent campaign appearance where he was attempting to explain why kids with asthma do much better when they receive regular doctor’s care, rather than sporadic ER visits for acute episodes? Hey Obama — aren’t mammograms preventative care?
17 November 2009, 4:41 pmdriver:
Obama is a lying lizard, but his followers won’t see this until the truck runs over them (See: James Thurber; “The Owl Who Was God.”) What to do with all of those cute, stylish pink ribbons?
17 November 2009, 4:44 pmStickerShock:
Driver, Ask that doc you are sleeping with about this. I saw it on Hot Air, where they were reporting about the new USPFTF report: “Mammograms produce false-positive results in about 10 percent of cases, causing anxiety and often prompting women to undergo unnecessary follow-up tests, sometimes-disfiguring biopsies and unneeded treatment, including surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.”
This sounds like a load of you know what. Has there ever been a surgeon or oncologist who would perform surgery or administer chemo or radiation based solely on a mammogram result? I can’t believe that is true.
17 November 2009, 5:24 pmdriver:
Oh, the last part is certainly crap, just like ENT docs performing unnecessary tonsillectomies and others performing unnecessary amputations. Any test can result in false positives, as I’ve found out in my own experiences. Stereotactic breast biopsies are the modern way to go, and are no more disfiguring that having a boil lanced. What we have here is government accountants deciding what is “necessary.”
17 November 2009, 5:30 pmStickerShock:
Just curious about false positives. Is 10% low? I’m thinking of alpha fetoprotein screening for Down Syndrome as an example. Adding false positives & negatives together makes it a much less reliable screening test than a mammogram. I’m wondering how “good” that 10% rate is in the grand scheme of medical tests. It seems that in the MSM layman discussion of these tests, the fact that they are screening tests, not diagnostic tests, gets lost. Screens by definition will catch a few that don’t belong & miss a few that should have been captured.
17 November 2009, 7:03 pmdriver:
OK, that is out of my league, will try to get some technical pillow talk out of the expert later.
17 November 2009, 7:07 pmBTM:
Sticker, there is a classic ROC curve analysis to access sensitivity and specificity of diagnostic or prognostic clinical tests to depict relative trade-offs between true positive (benefits) and false positive (costs). For deadly diseases, false positive rate should always be as high as necessary to completely eliminate the possibility of false negatives, since the latter is completely unacceptable (at least by today’s standards)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteristic
17 November 2009, 8:37 pmdriver:
Well, this was one of those mornings where I woke up with the dog instead of the doc. However, in the brief discussion we had, I was told that calling any mammogram “positive” is a misnomer, as they, like self-exams (or boy scout exams) typically are indicative only of changes; the nature of the change can only be determined by biopsy. Whether or not a biopsy is warranted is the determination of the radiologist or other specialist comparing new and old films. Of course, if you live in a malpractice lawsuit-prone area, you will have a much higher incidence of unnecessary biopsies, and therefore false positives. I was also referred to this site:
18 November 2009, 8:36 amhttp://www.cancer.org/docroot/NWS/content/NWS_1_1x_Study_Looks_at_Reasons_for_False_Positive_Mammograms.asp
StickerShock:
Thanks BTM & Driver. I will need some more coffee before I can tackle your links. I think we’ll need to send BTM & Driver’s paramour to Washington if the USPFTF recommendations sound fishy. The boy scouts can come along, too.
18 November 2009, 9:31 amHindoo:
BTM & driver are both brilliant. … This whole “change” in breast cancer/testing recommendations disturbs me. I’m tending to agree with Kathleen Sebelius that we should keep the old guidelines of starting at 40. The new guidelines sound too “bottom-line” for me.
18 November 2009, 9:25 pmTrudy:
so have you actually looked at the latest listing of the preventive services rated by the USPSTF? Most of the important ones are rated ‘D’ or I (meaning they have no clue). I am a senior health analyst and it makes me worry. the Secretary and press said–oh don’t look at the man behind the curtain….it doesnt mean anything if this panel says that mammograms are not wise for women under 50 unless you happen to see the complete list of the items they rate as ‘D’ and see that the Chairman’s Mark for the Senate’s Health Reform Bill says they want the power to 1) apply these standards to existing as well as new preventive services and 2) they can withdraw coverage for Medicare beneficiaries for anything rated ‘D’ or harmful. so why not for Medicaid folks too? because Medicaid folks are the darlings of the left — they love the poor (whom they can manipulate) while they hate the older folks who actually PAID INTO THE SYSTEM and deserve to get the benefits they were promised. the panel will grow and so will their list of services rated ‘D’.
19 January 2010, 4:22 pm