Obama healthcare rationing begins yesterday!

Yesterday on TV I saw the announcement that the US Preventive Service Task Force recommended women not get mammograms until age 50, and then only every two years. This flies in the face of years of recommendations and public awareness campaigns aimed at early screening of all cancers, not just breast cancer.

Why the change? I would dare to suggest you are seeing a foretaste of Obama rationed healthcare. Think I'm alone? I'm not. Today on the way home, I heard Dr. Ilona Farr call in to the Dan Fagan radio show on KFQD 750 am radio. She said she has 25 women with breast cancer in her practice, and at least half of them had their cancer detected prior to age 50. Dr. Farr indicated this was basically the future, rationed healthcare and a lack of access to early screening.

I'd dare to take it a step further, wondering if Sarah Palin's comment about "death panels" might be coming true as we watch history unfold before us. Consider this: if you are not given access to cancer screening until age 50, and you end up being found to have an advanced cancer that might have been caught at age 45, do you really think doctors will recommend aggressive treatment, or go the cheap route and send you to a hospice to die?

Of all the things the government could be doing to provide Americans with affordable healthcare, I can't imagine a better value than doing early cancer screening, to stop a tragedy before it becomes unstoppable. I do hope and pray that if the socialist fantasy of universal healthcare comes to pass, at least it would air on the side of early detection and treatment, instead of yesterday's recommendation of what to this admitted total non-doctor appears to be "wait until it's too late."