Declining Mammogram Rate Sign Of 'Cracking' Health Care System, Letter To Editor Says

The decline in mammogram rates is a sign that "even for those with [health] insurance," the health care system is "cracking," Linda Landesman, former president of the Public Health Association of New York City, writes in a New York Times letter to the editor in response to a May 15 Times editorial (Landesman, New York Times, 5/17). The editorial said that the "small but significant decline" in mammogram rates reported among women ages 40 and older from 2000 to 2005 is "disturbing" because it means that an increasing number of women will "fail" to receive the early detection that raises their chances of breast cancer survival.

Women who skip mammograms because of the "cost, inconvenience or simple inattention" risk not knowing breast cancer is developing until treatment might be "harder and the risk of death higher," the editorial added. The Times concluded that doctors and health promotion campaigns "need to ramp up their reminders of the value" of routine breast cancer screening and that health coverage for the mammograms "should be extended" to uninsured women (Kaiser Daily Women's Health Policy Report, 5/15).

According to Landesman, women in New York are "not skipping their mammograms" but rather must wait "four to six months to just get an appointment." In addition, Landesman writes that many hospitals and mammography centers are "having great difficulty finding radiologists who are trained and want to read mammograms." There is "much discussion about our health care system's being broken because of the number of uninsured who can't get timely care," Landesman writes, concluding that the "mammography crisis should serve as a canary" that people with health insurance also have difficulty receiving timely care (New York Times, 5/17).

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