Cartoon for the day

...and now Pap smears...

["Curiouser and curiouser."]


Holy Toledo! Now we don't need Pap smears as often. Have we been (the equivalent) of navel-gazing in the past, getting ourselves checked out too often? Our society is paranoid about cancer. Screenings make us feel like we're doing something, like we're being (that horrible corporate word) pro-active. As Sen. Arlen Spector told the New York Times, That is curious.
The past recommendation had been for young women to have Pap smears three years after becoming sexually active. Now the guidelines are to wait until age 21, no matter when a girl started having sex. The numbers bear this out: only two new cases per million teens (15 to 19 years old) per year in the U.S. What if you are one of the two girls? Everything makes sense, statistically, but not if you're one of the statistics.
The old tension between the individual vs. the community.
Cervical cancer is slow-growing, and pre-cancerous conditions often don't turn into cancer. Surgery for the pre-cancerous conditions could lead to premature births, says the Times.
This is the same thinking that went into the decision to recommend mammograms less often. The mammograms picked up non-cancerous tumors, which led to biopsies and more tests, for nothing, I guess you could say. And anxiety. Everyone is worried about our anxiety. I think most women would vote for a little surgery and anxiety so that their anxiety about cancer would be lessened. At least most women who have the choice.
A student of mine this fall thinks she has mono but can't afford health insurance or a visit to a doctor. She assured me last night she was no longer contagious. But she wasn't absolutely sure about the diagnosis, which had been delivered by a guess-timating nurse.
We all need the health insurance coverage that our federal elected officials get. Don't we deserve that?

The Need for Health Insurance

At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without universal health insurance.

Health insurance is like elementary education. To function properly, it must be universal and to be universal, it must be obligatory.

Certain interests which think they would be adversely affected by health insurance have made the specious plea that it is an un-American interference with liberty. According to the logic of those now shedding crocodile tears, we ought, in order to remain truly American and truly free, retain the precious liberties of our people to be illiterate, to suffer accidents without indemnification, as well as to be sick without indemnification.

It is by the compelling hand of the law that society secures liberation from the evils of crime, vice, ignorance, accidents, unemployment, invalidity, and disease.
--by Irving Fisher, The Progressive, Jan. 1917

A rant about health insurance

I had a good day mostly except for the following. Dr G wrote me a new Rx for tincture of opium. Swedish Hospital pharmacy is the only place I could find in Seattle that stocks it. I dropped off my prescription and went to lunch with a friend.

A second pharmacist told me that my health insurance provider would not authorize a new prescription until May 30. I told him that I had told the doctor I spilled some of this medication and have only a bit left for the next few days. The pharmacist asked me to wait while he confirmed this with the doc and called the health insurance company.

Half an hour later the pharmacist told me that the insurance provider refused to authorize any more of this drug until May 30, regardless of the circumstances. If I paid for the drug myself it would cost $174 ($50 if covered by the health insurance, still a hefty copay).

They filled my other prescriptions (a $10 copay each for vicodin and Megace). I need to start the Megace either tonight or tomorrow morning, must read up on it.

I left the pharmacy after almost three hours of this game without my opium prescription. Next step? Call the insurance company and see what I can do to be a squeaky wheel and get the meds my doctor believes I need.

I am so FRUSTRATED!