The first amendment introduced on the floor of the Senate comes from Sen. Barbara Mikulski, seeking to add a provision included in the HELP Committee version of the bill. This measure would mandate coverage – for free – for various women’s preventive health procedures and screenings. This is a direct response to the controversy surrounding [...]

Days after a controversial recommendation from the US Preventive Services Task Force on breast cancer screening, a separate organization has recommended less screenings for cervical cancer. Anyone seeing eerie parallels or ready to scream about “rationing” needs to read a bit more closely: New guidelines for cervical cancer screening say women should delay their first [...]

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius released a statement of thinly veiled criticism toward those new guidelines from the US Preventive Services Task Force on breast cancer screening: “There is no question that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Recommendations have caused a great deal of confusion and worry among women and their families [...]

It was inevitable that the news of the US Preventive Services Task Force changing their guidelines on mammography would cause a political uproar. In a year where Congress is not trying to do comprehensive health care reform, the findings would be controversial. In this year, especially because of the role of the USPSTF in at [...]

The US Preventive Services Task Force, which previously recommended that women get screened for breast cancer at age 40, have changed their recommendation: The new recommendations, which do not apply to a small group of women with unusual risk factors for breast cancer, reverse longstanding guidelines and are aimed at reducing harm from overtreatment, the [...]