Nancy Brinker, the founder of the world’s largest breast cancer cure advocacy group, is dismissing claims that last week’s battle over new proposed breast cancer screening guidelines should be a warning sign in the health care reform debate. She told nervous women not to read anything into the timing of the controversial new guidelines, which she rejects.
“People release data all the time,” Brinker said at a press conference this afternoon. Brinker is the founder of the Susan G. Komen For The Cure foundation, the largest organization in the world devoted to breast cancer research. She attacked the report, but dismissed attempts to make the report a political football in the health care debate.
“I don’t think so,” she said, when asked if the panel was “influenced” by the debate over reform.
Last week, a government health advisory panel released a report recommending a dramatic shift in the way women are screened for breast cancer in America. Among other things, the panel called on women to get fewer mammograms and to do fewer self-examinations than had previously been the norm. Though the report was the result of research that took place over the past two years, some Republicans claimed it was suggestive of the world under Democratic health care reform.
At a press conference last week, Republican leaders laid out the claim. From a report on in the Washington Post:
“This is how rationing starts,” declared Jon Kyl of Arizona, the party’s second-in-command in the Senate, during a news conference. “This is what we’re going to expect in the future.”
Said Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska: “Those recommendations will be used by the insurance companies as they make a determination as to what they’re going to cover.”
Brinker wouldn’t speak to the politics of the situation, claiming that the Komen foundation steers clear of “partisan politics.” (For their part, Democrats have rejected the Republican warnings about the recommendations and noted that the group has no power to make policy.)
Brinker expressed support for some of the central goals of the reform plans in the House and Senate, such as expanding access to coverage and eliminating preexisting condition screening. Brinker said her group was lobbying Congress to create a final bill that helps further the goals of the Komen foundation.
She attacked the new recommendations, and warned private insurance companies to ignore them or else. She said her group would publicly attack any company that changes what screening it will pay for based on the new guidelines from the government group.
“We’ll be watching,” she said.
