Far Less Women Get Routine Mamograms and Pap Smears in "Universal Coverage" Countries. Will US Women End Up

Question

... getting fewer routine exams and, thus, end up dying earlier under Hillary's program?

What do you think of universal coverage in other countries when it has led to higher rates of women dying from cancer?

Answer 1

Looks like not.
Maybe they know something:

""University of Toronto
Study challenges mammogram effectiveness in breast screening

Annual mammograms do not lower breast cancer deaths in women aged 50 to 59 who are also receiving professional breast physical examinations and have training in breast self-examination, say University of Toronto researchers reporting on the Canadian National Breast Screening Study-2 (CNBSS).

"After an average follow-up of 13 years comparing two groups of women aged 50-59- one group receiving annual mammograms and breast physical examinations and the other physical examinations alone- we've found that breast cancer mortality is almost identical in the two groups," said Dr. Anthony Miller, a professor emeritus in the Faculty of Medicine's department of public health sciences, director of the CNBSS and lead author of the study published in the Sept. 20 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. "This is the first long-term screening trial to investigate the benefits of mammography over and above breast physical examinations. All other trials have compared the effectiveness of mammogram screening to no screening at all."

The trial involved almost 40,000 women in their fifties who volunteered to participate at 15 screening centres across Canada. From 1980 to 1985, the researchers randomly assigned 19,711 women to the combined mammogram/examination group and 19,694 women to the physical examination-only group. This ensured an equal distribution of demographic variables and breast cancer risk factors in each group. All women were taught breast self-examination.

Over the screening and follow-up period, 622 women were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in the combination group and 610 in the physical examination-only group. As of 1996, 107 women in the combination group had died of breast cancer compared to 105 in the physical examination-only group. ""