More on the Democratic party’s War on Breasts.

Via Instapundit, HHS Secretary Sebelius is trying to do some damage control on the recent ‘suggestion’ that women stop getting routine mammograms before they’re 50:

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, meanwhile, told women to ignore the new advisory recommendations for now.

“The U.S. Preventive Task Force is an outside independent panel of doctors and scientists who make recommendations. They do not set federal policy and they don’t determine what services are covered by the federal government,” said Sebelius in a written statement.

“Our policies remain unchanged,” she said of the federal government. ” Indeed, I would be very surprised if any private insurance company changed its mammography coverage decisions as a result of this action.”

A statement that is very comforting… until you remember that the Democratic party’s goal is to establish governmental control over the health care insurance industry.  Who here thinks that an insurance company already grimly aware that they exist on governmental sufferance might feel the need to ‘change its mammography coverage decisions’ to reflect current state medical policy?  Particularly if there are consequences for not being in compliance with all the laws, regulations, rulings, and opinions that bureaucracies generate more or less automatically.  And if the government doesn’t like the idea that people are going to instinctively assume that said bureaucracy is willing to ‘encourage’ ostensibly-private entities to follow bureaucratic dictates, then perhaps the government might like to consider reining in its bureaucrats.  As publicly as it can manage.

I’ll end by noting that this is all an inevitable by-product of the health care rationing bill; it is, in fact, why I call it that.  More people covered, better service, lower costs: in the best-case scenario, pick any two.  In the scenario that we’re going to get, if this passes?  We’ll get the first one, and the current ruling party will muck up the second while flagrantly ignoring the third.  That’s because the first one is easy, and can be done by lazy people.  The other two require work to accomplish.

Moe Lane

PS: Ed Morrissey reports that there are no oncologists on the task force that made the ‘recommendations.’  I really, really hope that this isn’t actually true.

Crossposted to RedState.