E-mail about proposed breast-cancer hospitalization law: Is it for real?
My colleague Lorraine Ahearn forwarded to me an e-mail that, to judge from its indenting, has been sent to many places. It says insurance companies are trying to make mastectomies for breast cancer an outpatient procedure. It says women who have undergone such operations experience a great deal of pain and discomfort afterward and need to stay in the hospital at least two days afterward before being sent home. And it asks people to sign a petition in favor of a bill supposedly pending in Congress that would do just that.
I get lots of e-mails seeking signatures on petitions favoring or opposing this issue/bill or that, and a ton of them are hoaxes. (The alleged federal tax on e-mail is one example that still pops up from time to time.) So I wondered: Is this e-mail for real?
More or less, yes.
When I pay attention to mass e-mails at all, my first stop is usually the myth-busting Web site Snopes.com. I searched on the bill name mentioned in the e-mail, "Breast Cancer Patient Protection Act," and sure enough, Snopes had an entry.
There is such a bill, Snopes said, linking to both House and Senate versions. Similar bills have been introduced in previous Congresses but have died in committee. The current versions, H.R. 119 in the House and S. 459, are indeed sitting in committees, with no major action on either since their referral to committees earlier this year.
The petition referred to in the e-mail can be signed on a Web site run by the women-oriented cable network Lifetime TV here. That page also indicates that a House subcommittee had held a hearing on the bill May 21. That hearing is not reflected on the House link above, but that might just mean that that Web site doesn't consider a hearing, without a vote, to be a "major action."
Anyway, the petition is there if you want to sign it. (For the record, being no expert on breast cancer, I have no opinion on the bills.) Snopes also says, and I agree, that if you want movement on the bills, you probably also should get in touch with your congresscritter and senators. If you're not sure who they are, you can find out at House.gov and Senate.gov, respectively.
Comments (2)
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"(For the record, being no expert on breast cancer, I have no opinion on the bills.)"
Lex, that's not good enough. Some say that there are only two kinds of women in this world: those who have breast cancer and those who are terrified that they will get it.
A mastectomy is not a simple issue and shepherding women out of health care institutions as fast as possible is cause for alarm. If it were as common for men to have testicular cancer and have one or both testicles removed with the same rate as mastectomies are performed, would you not have an opinion about keeping post-surgical patients who are in pain and with possible complications in a hospital for at least one or two days?
You can't have "no opinion" on essential healthcare for women with breast cancer anymore; you need to get informed and get an opinion. And people should be urged to sign that petition and click this link every day.
Posted on June 30, 2008 6:06 PM
Sue, as I think you know, I don't play an advocacy role on public-policy issues. I will say that keeping *anyone* who is in a lot of pain (and not able to care for him/herself) in the hospital, or some other kind of supervised care, is almost certainly a good idea. Whether this bill is the most appropriate way of seeing to that is another question entirely and one I'm not qualified to try to answer at this point.
Posted on July 1, 2008 9:08 AM