Recently had my mammogram. I have these cysts my OB/GYN wants to watch, bless her heart.

The tech at the breast health center told me the cysts are harmless fluid-filled sacks embeddedin my fibrous tissue. She said this as she wrenched my flesh into the giant panini maker.

Terrific. My lovelies are small and sagging already. Now they’ll be flat too.

I’m thankful for the screening and relieved for the benign results. I’m also poignantly reminded that some in Washington consider it a drain of resources to screen these harmless cysts. Thank you, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.

These cysts don’t pose a risk to me now. Why waste the money?

Problem is, like some politicians, disease can be random and unpredictable.

Mammograms exist to identify abnormalities early. And early is when you may still have a chance to survive them.

True proponents of life-saving quality healthcare would throw the full force of their support behind preventive technologies. Then they would get to work figuring out how to make them affordable.

But the capitalist option is unfair, whines the left. But the socialist option is evil, whines the right.

Come on, people. Is that the best you can do?

This is America. We invent things here.

Nobody likes President Obama’s healthcare plan except the folks who wrote it. Lord knows no one else read it.

Repeal it already and come up with something better.

Because if there’s one thing I hate more than mammograms and short-sighted politicians, it’s cancer.

So bring on the pokers, the prodders, the scans. The cultures, the ultrasounds and the mammograms. I’ll pay for them out of my own pocket if I must.

But don’t stand in the way of the tests and treatments that could save my life. Don’t ration, diminish and dumb down my care.

Battered as it may be, and in some places flattened, the length of my life is not for any government to decide.

All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. Psalm 139:16 NIV

Thanks to Carl Carlton whose 1981 hit She’s a Bad Mama Jama inspired the title. Click here to listen on YouTube and start your weekend dancing.