Having heard, in excruciating detail, the whole mammogram procedure from my wife, I can tell you that I would understand why women might be reluctant to have them done as frequently as doctors would like them to.
Breast cancer is certainly an ominous enough issue to get women to self examine and get mammograms, but I understand that some women simply choose not to do mammograms due to the discomfort. I won’t even pretend to give advice in this area, but I did want to pass on some information from Medical News Today that might help some women deal with the discomfort issue.
I only have two frames of reference for this. One woman, when explaining mammograms, used an analogy of annually being checked for leg cancer by having your toes run over by a car. All righty then!! The other frame of reference is simply a fear of mine that some day they will decide that men should be checked annually for testicular cancer, and what the heck, we already have this machine….
From a life insurance underwriting standpoint, insurance companies want to see us do as much of these types of exams as we can stand, and one thing that they absolutely insist on is that if you were told by a doctor to have a test, it has to be completed before they will offer insurance.
Bottom line. It’s better to know and catch cancer early. Whether it is breast, prostate or colon cancer, the tests aren’t comfortable, but it beats not knowing.
September 20th, 2007
All right guys! There is the statistic out there that has been bugging me for years. Women, on average, outlive us by 5 years. Because life insurance companies can count on women to follow through with their end of the bargain, the give them better life insurance rates than us guys. But I have a plan!!
I went to Wikipedia and got far more information than I bargained for on the subject of mortality tables, but they were as blunt as anyone out there stating that, “tables are usually constructed separately for men and for women because of their substantially different mortality rates.” We don’t even get to be on the same table.
Life insurance companies have the standard mortality tables that assume how long you will live if you are perfectly healthy and then they have mortality tables based on assumptions such as having heart disease or diabetes, and then they break it down even further and they have assumptions depending on how old you were at the time you were diagnosed. I’m thinking they probably have a table that differentiates between whether I really earned my high school diploma or if I was just given a diploma to get me out of the building.
There is one playing field. In Montana, quite some time ago, some brilliant legislator chauvinist person (Chauvinist in Montana means stupid), decided that the way to take that break away from women was to have unisex rates. Women pay the same rates as men in one place in the whole world. Women don’t much like men in Montana anymore.
So, men…..my plan. We all have to agree to this or it won’t work. We all have to execute a living will that states that at the time of our demise we insist on being put on life support for 6 years. That will flip the whole mortality assumption thing around and we will be the gender with the cheapest insurance…..My nephew is on board. That’s two of us.
Bottom line. Mortality tables aren’t perfect, but, like it or not it’s what insurance companies use to decide what you will pay.
September 20th, 2007
