“unless they are counting cost of the number of noncancerous lumps found and biopsied which wouldn’t be found until a biannual mammogram and seen as noncancerous on the x-ray.
That’s exactly what they’re doing: every form of breast cancer screening results in false positives that cost money and patient time to disconfirm. I think the premise here is that ASSUMING mammograms every 2 years, the value-added of breast self-exam is low. For every women who is spared a premature death, there will be hundreds or thousands of others who undergo avoidable biopsies, physician consults etc. So when everything gets toted up, we’d be effectively spending millions of dollars for each added year of life.
It’s a classic illustration of cost-ineffective care. If women want to spend their own money on more frequent mammograms or the follow-up care that results from monthly breast self-exam, all power to them. But we shouldn’t protect them from facing this trade-off by socializing the costs of cancer screening through private insurance or public insurance, because that just dumps the cost on everyone else.
Medicine is replete with examples like this. Obama vastly oversimplified the issue by talking about red pills and blue pills and acting as if all we need to do is eliminate care that confers zero medical benefits. In reality, most of the “excess” care in our current system does confer some benefits to patients, but the size of the gains in life expectancy or health status are too small to warrant the large costs required to achieve them.
Depends on what kind of error you would endore. And that depends on who you are.
Fine and dandy to say there are too many false positives, biopsies, etc with mammograms and it is too costly if you are talking about a population.
But every woman I know would willlingly risk a false positive and a biopsy to avoid waiting on a cancer.
And that has to be taken into account.
Hubby is researching the group recommending this right now.All academics, nobody in practice who treats real people.
And you cannot say let the women pay for it if they wish. It would be differtent if the choice was fully explained and women could decide. But to pretend it is a better choice to delay mammograms is a lie. It is not a better choice. It is a cheaper choice.