Talk About Bad Timing

I see in the Gazette that some government group of exalted experts has recently come out with suggestions on screening for breast cancer with mammograms. They said those of the female persuasion should not start getting mammograms at age 40, but rather wait until they were 50.

Naturally enough, it was fairly easy to find articulate ladies in their 40s who had had mammograms that found cancers in an early stage, and they readily agreed to having interviews, probably for free too.

So now, in addition to us old folks gradually getting more suspicious that our exalted politicians were out to ration us out of existence—how else could they save money on Medicare—now they are arousing the wrath of 40 somethings who would have not discovered their cancers until perhaps it was too late: And worse, it seems very clear that this is an example of another form of rationing that will be inevitable with government medicine. Instead of high mucky-mucks making their pronouncements and then us turning to our local physicians who would advise us whether we should listen to them or not, we will not have that option.

Of course, there is more to it than the simplified argument above but that is not how we conduct our so-called "health-care debates."