The real war on women

by TheHill.com - 07/17/16 1:56 PM ET

The relationship between a woman and her doctor is deeply private. I say that as, well, a woman and as a doctor.

Unfortunately, ObamaCare creates or empowers a multitude of government agencies and task forces to interpose themselves in the middle of that relationship. But putting bureaucrats in the treatment room will have disastrous consequences for the health and well-being of millions of women.

Case in point: The United States Preventive Services Task Force. Its job is to make “recommendations” about the effectiveness of specific preventive care services and assign letter grades to the specific medical procedures. Under ObamaCare, only items or services assigned an A or B will be covered at no additional cost for patients, but those graded a C, D, or I may not be. In practice, this bureaucratic meddling tends to limit what health insurers offer their customers.

Late last month, the USPSTF declared that routine pelvic exams for women may not be medically beneficial. These exams are used to detect early signs of a number of serious conditions, from sexually transmitted diseases and serious infections that affect our ability to have children to cancer.

Women understand how important this is for their health. Here in America, we undergo some 60 million pelvic exams a year. The majority of preventive care visits to obstetrician-gynecologists include a yearly pelvic exam with cervical cancer screening every three years for 21 to 30 year olds and then every five years. The stakes are too high for us to forego this basic medical check-up – our lives may literally be on the line.

But thanks to the USPSTF’s statements, it is now possible the task force may soon move forward with a full “recommendation” that may limit women’s access to annual pelvic exams.

If this happens, doctors may stop providing a crucial medical service because of interference from the task force. But it isn’t hard to see where this ends up. Going forward, millions of women won’t receive a check-up that could have detected serious problems and life-threatening conditions.

The consequences will be higher costs, more preventable illnesses, and – most tragically – lost lives. Is that really a cost worth paying?

Ask a woman, and the answer is sure to be a resounding “no!” Sure enough, we said exactly that the last time the USPSTF tried to cut us off from a basic medical procedure that millions of women depend on.

The task force ruled in 2009 that women between 50 and 74 don’t need yearly mammograms, which are used primarily to detect breast cancer, that every other year screening is all that needs to be covered. But this may have the perverse effect of limiting access to mammograms for women under 50, which is the age range when breast cancer often develops in a more aggressive, more deadly form.

They could have asked someone like me – I was diagnosed with breast cancer after a routine yearly mammogram discovered it four years ago. Had the government’s mandate been in effect when I was diagnosed, I likely wouldn’t have received the mammogram that ultimately saved my life.

My story is not unique; countless women are alive today because of mammograms they received before they turned 50 years old or from yearly mammograms thereafter. For all of us, and for the millions of others who knew they could one day be in our situations, the USPSTF’s edict was simply unmaintainable.

The Obama administration realized that this was a political nightmare, especially as it was trying to pass ObamaCare. But it did not ultimately disagree with the task force’s recommendation. So it snuck a line in ObamaCare that essentially declared that the USPSTF’s rulings in 2009 could be ignored.

But this was only a temporary fix, and it was deliberate. Earlier this year, the task force re-issued its 2009 ruling on women and mammograms, and this time it literally took an act of Congress to prevent these untested recommendations from dictating our medical care. Congress passed a bill in December 2015 that included a provision extending the exception for screening mammography through January 2018. Come that time, we will have to fight this battle all over again.

Such is the nature of government intervention in health care. No matter how well-intentioned it is, it ultimately empowers bureaucrats and politicians to seat themselves square in the middle of exam room, dictating to doctors and patients alike what they can and cannot do.

As a woman, a doctor, and a survivor of a disease that wouldn’t have been caught under the government’s control, I can’t think of anything more frightening. Now every woman in America needs to ask herself a simple question: Who do we trust to help us make life-and-death decisions – ourselves and our physicians, or faceless bureaucrats and politicians?