Sen. Rolfes deserves praise for women’s health bill | LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Published 11:11 am Wednesday, March 16, 2016

To the editor:

A big thank you to Senator Christine Rolfes for sponsoring SB-6146, a bill that would protect women from a missed, delayed or late stage breast cancer diagnosis.

Her bill had 22 co-sponsors. Unfortunately the bill was stalled in the Senate Health Care Committee as the woman Chair of that committee would not give it a hearing.

The chair was influenced by lobbyists for the doctors of ACOG and WSMA who told us that women would be too frightened if they got a sentence in their mammogram letter saying they had heterogeneously dense or very dense breast tissue and should discuss this breast cancer risk factor with their doctor. That excuse is demeaning to women and there is no evidence to support it. Forty percent of women have dense breast tissue which is one of the strongest risk factors associated with breast cancer yet 95 percent of women don’t know if they have dense tissue or not. Less than one in 10 learn about their dense tissue from their doctors. Only a mammogram can determine the density of your breast tissue.

For more than two decades, research has demonstrated that mammograms miss 50 percent of breast cancers in women with dense breast tissue. Senate Bill 6146 would have required the facility where your mammogram was performed include information about your breast tissue density in your mammogram letter.

Washington women have a right to know all the results of their mammogram screening so they can have informed discussions with their health care provider about their breast cancer risks. Women are being denied information that could save their lives, information the doctors have and don’t even know they have it.

So whose job is it to provide this information to women?

The radiologists say women should have the information but say the doctors should inform the women.

The doctors are not informing women, so give women the information so they can initiate the discussion with their doctor about whether additional screening might be right for them.

There were enough votes in the Senate to pass the bill but the bill didn’t get a hearing.

Twenty-four states have such laws and 11 states are working on bills. Washington shouldn’t be the last state giving women equal access to an early breast cancer diagnosis when cancers found early have better treatment and survival outcomes.

For the past three years a density inform bill didn’t get passed because of politics (a divided Legislature), not on the merits of the bill. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue, it is a breast health issue that affects Republican and Democratic women equally.

Thank you, Senator Rolfes, for working so hard on this bill. We will try again next year.

KATHY VIELHABER

Bellingham