Our hard work has paid off!
Late Wednesday night a two year moratorium proposal was introduced in the House against the USPSTF screening mammogram recommendations!
The bill, HR 3339, was introduced by Reps. Renee Ellmers, (R-NC), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). It is called the Protect Access to Lifesaving Screenings (PALS) Act. We hope you all will help spread the word – we need your networks/membership to contact their members of Congress and ask them to co-sponsor the bill. The House is in recess until September 8, sowe have a little over a month to build sufficient support to improve the chances of prompt action when Congress returns.
We are asking you to act now and forward this petition to your network so we can get even more support. We also wanted to mention that several members of the Senate are also discussing sponsoring the bill, and we may have news about a Senate bill before the Senate departs for the August recess next week.
We are are also getting some great press about our work on this initiative. Here is a story carried in Bloomberg and it includes quotes from the sponsors, attached is the pdf of full bill for you to share, and finally, two of our participants from Indiana, a nurse navigator and a breast cancer survivor, were interviewed by a local new crew, check out the video.
Thank you for all you have done. It is hard to believe that all of this has happened in the three weeks since the petition was launched. Thank you to all of you who joined our April “call to action” urging you to make a public comment in opposition to the United State Preventative Service Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations on breast screening guidelines and to share your concerns with your congressional representatives. We also thank our 30 Washington Fly-In participants, who met with 90 congress people from 15 states over a very short period of time. Much progress has been made in a very short period of time, so finally and most importantly we must thank Hologic and the staff of Alston and Bird for their support and planning of this initiative.
The NCBC will continue to update the membership on this issue throughout the summer. Together we can make a difference.
Thank you for your action.
