You, Your Family, the US Preventive Task Force Recommendations and Health Reform (ACA)

If you have time on your hands and have chosen to study the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,  you have seen many references to the US Preventive Task Force Recommendations.  The ACA references Grade A and B recommendations and tells you that you will qualify, often without charge at all, to receive care specified in those A and B recommendations and implies that that your physicians and insurers had better be familiar with those recommendations because they are binding on them.

I have been around long enough to know that some patients are more knowledgeable about health issues on the internet than their physicians and other providers, so here is the link to the task force preventive services recommendations with my personal recommendation (I am your blogger, not your doctor) that you read through them and - when you have questions about how the recommendations apply to you, your spouse or partner, your kids or parents or grandchildren,  you ask your doc (or other provider or even insurer) those questions.  You may get some blank stares. You may even face some obvious discomfort or annoyance.  But do it anyway, if for no other reason, than your doctor (or other provider) needs to know about them and needs to know that you and other patients and their families know about them. That's how we change behavior and impose new and BETTER societal standards of medical care.  So let's do it.