New Cutback in Protocol for Cancer Screening - The Message Is Clear: Drop Dead!

With the second announcement in one week, that certain categories of women should not receive routine cancer screening, the message is clear: The era of Hitler health has begun in earnest.

This time, it's the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, who announced that they no longer recommend that girls get Pap tests for cervical cancer before the age of 21, allegedly because the tests proved more harmful than helpful. The new guidelines call for screening only every other year until the age of 30, and then every third year if there are no abnormalities. This contrasts sharply with current practice of yearly Pap tests—and, as one doctor, Thomas Herzog of Columbian University Presbyterian Hospital, noted, will save a lot of money.

The common denominator of both recommendations of "evidence-based medicine," is the reliance on statistics which implicitly, or explicitly, weigh the odds of survival, against the cost. This Nazi approach, which dominates the backers of the Obama health bill, is startlingly clearly reflected in a Washington Post column by Steven Pearlstein today. Pearlstein blasts the attitude, reflected in an op-ed by a member of the American Cancer Society against the mammography restrictions the day before, which calls for fighting to save every life. It's this attitude which makes us the most expensive, least effective health care system in the industrialize world, he says. (I.e. We'll never cut money out of health care this way!)