Carly Fiorina Exploits Recent Bout With Cancer To Fearmonger About Mammogram Recommendations (VIDEO

[jefferson_dem]

Carly Fiorina Exploits Recent Bout With Cancer To Fearmonger About Mammogram Recommendations

California Senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina is exploiting her recent bout with breast cancer to lie about the role of the U.S. Preventive Task Force and fearmonger about the consequences of health care reform. “This Task Force was explicitly asked to focus on costs, not just prevention. As it turned out, costs were a significant factor in this recommendation,” Fiorina says in this week’s Republican address. “Will a bureaucrat determine that my life isn’t worth saving?,” she asks before suggesting that the Senate health care bill would allow the Task Force to ration cancer treatments:

Do we really want government bureaucrats rather than doctors dictating how we treat things like breast cancer?…The health care bill now being debated in the Senate explicitly empowers this very Task Force to influence future coverage and preventive care. Section 4105, for example, authorizes the Secretary of Health and Human Services to deny payment for prevention services the Task Force recommends against. Another section requires every health insurer in America requires to cover Task Force recommended services….While some defend the idea of a government Task Force, my experience with cancer tells me it’s wrong.

Watch it:

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is an independent panel of experts first convened by the U.S. Public Health Service during the administration of President Ronald Reagan. The panel “is financed by the Department of Health and Human Services but works at arms length from it, making its decisions without consulting the agency.” Panelists are prohibited from “considering costs when they make guidelines.”

“Our job is to review scientific evidence, politics play no role in our deliberative processes. Costs were never considered in our considerations,” Task Force Chairman Dr. Ned Calonge testified last week before the the House Subcommittee on Health.

The task force issues recommendations that help doctors decide on a course of treatment. Providers can use the recommendations as a starting point to examine a patient’s particular needs, but the task force has no authority over coverage or treatment decisions. “We expect clinicians to do what they’re trained to do in order to address the needs of the individual patient and his or her best interest,” Calonge said in his testimony. For the mammogram decision, which received a Grade of ‘C’ from the Task Force, “we recommend that the patient be informed of the potential benefits and harms and then be supported in making his or her informed choice about being tested.”

<SNIP>

VIDEO at LINK - http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/12/05/fiorina-mammogram/

[msongs]

1. another filthy rich republican corporate ***** like Meg Whitman nt

[TheCowsCameHome]

2. She gave the GOP's weekly radio address this morning.

Honest to God, she sounds like she's got a speaking disorder of some sort.

Very painful to listen to, even aside from her message making no sense.

[mcablue]

3. Fiorina's cancer was found in February this year, at age 55. What's she talking about

The recommendation that has been attacked most by the right is the one about women in their 40's.

The guidelines say that women like Fiorina, in their 50's, should get checked every 2 years. If she had done this, she would have found her cancer anyway.

50: no exam
51: exam
52: no exam
53: exam
54: no exam
55: exam (which is exactly what happened here).

[geek_sabre]

4. she said she found a lump 2 weeks after a clear mammogram

The task force discouraged self-exams overall.

what if she'd (more logically) gone:

50: exam
51: no exam
52: exam
53: no exam
54: exam
55: no exam

She could be dead. I think that's her point.