Bruce Watson has a great breakdown of some of the cost issues involved in making decisions like Angelina Jolie’s to have a preventative double mastectomy:
On Tuesday, Angelina Jolie drew headlines with her announcement that she has undergone a preventative double mastectomy. As she wrote in the pages of The New York Times, a blood test revealed that she carries a damaged BRCA1 gene — a defect that greatly increases the odds of a woman getting breast cancer. Facing what she said was an 87 percent chance of developing the disease, she decided to undergo a prophylactic double mastectomy, an operation that reduced her risk to 5 percent.
Jolie’s decision to have a prophylactic mastectomy before any sign of the cancer had manifested, and her willingness to openly discuss it, is shedding fresh light on breast cancer — as well as on the very real problems with how the American medical community deals with this disease. Every step in Jolie’s process — from the tests that uncovered her faulty gene, to the operations she underwent to protect against it, to the post-surgery reconstruction — highlights shortcomings in the American health care system, and inequities in the care that most Americans receive.
To put it another way, when it comes to breast cancer care, your health may often be trumped by your finances: even if your best bet is to follow in Jolie’s footsteps, you might not be able to afford the screening, care and surgery that may have saved her life.
Breast Cancer Gene: Why Most Women Can’t Do What Angelina Jolie Did
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