Washington (CNN) -- A federal advisory board's recommendation that women in their 40s should avoid routine mammograms is not government policy and has caused "a great deal of confusion," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Wednesday. 
 
 "My message to women is simple. Mammograms have always been an important life-saving tool in the fight against breast cancer, and they still are today," Sebelius said in a statement. 
 
 "Keep doing what you have been doing for years: talk to your doctor about your individual history, ask questions and make the decision that is right for you." 
 
 With her statement, Sebelius waded into the controversy over Monday's announcement by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that women in their 40s should not get routine mammograms for early detection of breast cancer. 
 
 Sebelius' statement is aimed at "making it clear these recommendations are not ours," a White House source said. 
 
 The report "shouldn't be dismissed," Sebelius said on CNN's "The Situation Room." But she added, "There are other groups who have disagreed with this information." The task force is "making recommendations, not coverage decisions, not payment decisions." 
 
 Government health programs such as Medicaid will continue to cover routine mammograms, she said. 
 
 "We will continue to recommend it, and the health plans have indicated that they will do the same," Sebelius said. "If the health care provider recommends a mammogram for a patient, they intend to cover that payment." 
 
 Though the Preventive Services Task Force is independent, the Department of Health and Human Services' Web site calls the panel's recommendations the "gold standard," and insurance companies look to the panel for guidance on which preventive care practices they should cover. 
 
 With the Obama administration fighting to push a sweeping overhaul of U.S. health insurance through Congress, Republicans quickly jumped at the chance to attack the mammography report. 
 
 "This is how rationing begins," said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee. "This is the little toe in the edge of the water. And this is where you start getting a bureaucrat between you and your physician." 
 
 The White House disputes that, saying the recommendations "cannot be used to deny treatment" on their own. Sebelius said the task force won't make coverage decisions. 
 
 "Mammograms have been a huge step forward for millions of American women, but we still have about 21 million women and girls in America who don't have a doctor, who don't receive any kind of mammogram screening on any kind of basis regardless of their age," she said. "The health reform debate is about closing that gap." 
 
 Criticism of the recommendation has come from quarters other than opponents of the Democratic health care bills. The American Cancer Society said it disagrees with the findings of the task force and continues to recommend annual screening, including mammograms, for all women beginning 40 and over. 
 
 "With its new recommendations, the [task force] is essentially telling women that mammography at age 40 to 49 saves lives, just not enough of them," said Dr. Otis Brawley, the group's chief medical officer. 
 
 And Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Florida, who was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer at 41, called the panel's recommendations "really disturbing" and "absolutely irresponsible." 
 
 "It's a very patronizing attitude that these scientists have taken," she said. "It's pretty outrageous to suggest that women couldn't handle more information." 
 
 Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce's Subcommittee on Health, has announced that he will lead hearings into the advisory board's recommendations. 
 
 Wasserman-Schultz said those hearings "will help us reach the appropriate policy conclusion, which I believe is that these recommendations should be set aside." 
 
 Breast cancer is the most common cancer for U.S. women, with nearly 200,000 women expected to be diagnosed with the invasive form of the disease this year, according to the American Cancer Society. 
 
 For women 50 to 74, it recommended routine mammography screenings every two years. Risks and benefits for women age 75 and older are unknown, it said. 
 
 While roughly 15 percent of women in their 40s detect breast cancer through mammography, data show that many other women experience false positives, anxiety, and unnecessary biopsies as a result of the test, according to the task force. 
 
 The Preventive Services Task Force reviews medical data and bases recommendations on effectiveness and risks involved. It is composed of 16 health care experts, none of whom are oncologists, though a team of cancer experts presented its findings to the group. 
 
 CNN's Danielle Dellorto and Gloria Borger contributed to this report. ||||| (CNN) In a move sure to befuddle women -- and anger some breast cancer survivors -- the American Cancer Society has issued new guidelines saying less screening for breast cancer is better than more. 
 
 The venerated cancer organization says women should start getting mammograms at 45 instead of 40, and that everyone can skip the routine manual breast checks by doctors. 
 
 An exhaustive review of the medical literature shows these measures just aren't very effective, according to the group. "The chance that you're going to find a cancer and save a life is actually very small," said Dr. Otis Brawley, the society's chief medical officer. 
 
 Now three key groups -- the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists , the American Cancer Society, and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force -- recommend different ages for starting regular mammograms: 40, 45 and 50 respectively. 
 
 While mammograms save lives, they can also cause harm, and each group does a different job of balancing the pros and cons. 
 
 Earlier testing is not necessarily better 
 
 The problem with mammograms is that they have a relatively high false positive rate, which means women sometimes have to undergo painful and time-consuming tests only to find out they never had cancer in the first place. 
 
 The chances of false positives are especially high for women under 45, as they have denser breasts and tumors are harder to spot on an image. "If she starts screening at age 40, she increases the risk that she'll need a breast cancer biopsy that turns out with the doctor saying 'You don't have cancer, so sorry we put you through all this,'" Brawley said. 
 
 He said he knows women who've had false positives year after year. "False positives are a huge deal," he said. "These women are so frightened and inconvenienced they swear off mammography for the rest of their lives." 
 
 Six years ago, the federal government's Preventive Services Task Force caused a furor when it declared that women in their 40s didn't need to get routine mammograms. Younger women whose breast cancers were caught by mammograms angrily responded that they would have been dead if they'd followed that guideline. 
 
 They said they'd gladly risk a false positive, with all the inconvenient and sometimes painful followup, for the chance of finding a cancer. 
 
 Learning from that experience, the American Cancer Society has sought to soften its message, emphasizing that women in their early 40s should still be able to get mammograms if they want them, as long as they understand the risks. 
 
 There's the risk of a false positive, plus the risk that a mammogram could catch a very small breast cancer that will go way on its own, or never progress to the point that it hurts a woman. In other words, a mammogram could catch a tumor that isn't really worth catching. 
 
 Several reports discuss the spontaneous regression of cancer, including breast cancer 
 
 But since doctors can't reliably discern the harmful from the harmless cancers, they treat them all. This means some women are getting potentially harmful treatments, such as radiation, chemotherapy and surgery, when their tumor would never have caused a problem, Brawley says. 
 
 A Canadian study looked at 44,925 women who were screened for breast cancer, and 106 of them fell into this category and were treated for breast cancer "unnecessarily," according to a review in the New England Journal of Medicine. 
 
 New guidelines have their critics 
 
 While agreeing with the American Cancer Society that mammograms aren't perfect, some advocates for women criticized the group's new guidelines. First, they said the society looked mostly at studies of film mammography, which in the United States has almost been entirely replaced by digital mammography. 
 
 Digital mammograms generate clearer images and do a better job of finding cancer and have a lower false positive rate. 
 
 "It's like standard versus HD TV," said Dr. Therese Bevers, the chair of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network's guidelines panel for breast cancer screening and diagnosis, and the medical director of the Cancer Prevention Center at the MD Anderson Cancer Center. 
 
 Second, critics said the cancer society looked only at whether screening saved a woman's life, and not at whether screening caught a cancer early, so the woman could avoid the most drastic treatments, such as chemotherapy or mastectomy. 
 
 "The American Cancer Society made the value judgment that screening is only worth it if improves survival," said Dr. Marisa Weiss, a breast cancer survivor and president of Breastcancer.org. "There's an arrogance to that. Let women decide what's meaningful to them." 
 
 Insurance companies also decide 
 
 The new guidelines also state that women over age 55 can choose to get a mammogram every other year, since breast cancers in post-menopausal women tend to develop more slowly. 
 
 To a great extent it will be insurance companies that decide at what age women get mammograms. In 2009, they typically continued to pay for mammograms starting at age 40 even though the government's task for force recommended mammograms starting at age 50. 
 
 But it's not clear what they'll do now that the American Cancer Society has also raised the age for mammograms. 
 
 "(Insurance) plans will certainly take these updated recommendations into account when evaluating their coverage policies," Clare Krusing, a spokeswoman for America's Health Insurance Plans, wrote to CNN in an email. 
 
 The new guidelines are meant for women at average risk of breast cancer. The society says women with a family history or who carry a gene that predisposes them to breast cancer may need to start screening earlier and more frequently. 
 
 As for the recommendation to discontinue routine manual breast exams by doctors, many advocates for women with breast cancer agree there's a lack of good evidence that they save lives, but some said they saw no reason to get rid of them. 
 
 "It's a free and added way of knowing whether or not a lump is there," said Leigh Hurst, founder of the Feel Your Boobies Foundation. 
 
 In the end, with so many different opinions on preventing breast cancer, experts are worried women will throw up their hands. 
 
 "Our biggest concern is that this will create a lot of potential havoc in the day-to-day practice of caring for women," said Dr. Christopher Zahn, the vice president of practice activities for ACOG. ||||| Yearly mammography screenings for women ages 40 to 59 do not reduce breast cancer deaths, even though they make a diagnosis of illness more likely, according to a long-term study of nearly 90,000 Canadian women. 
 
 The research, published Tuesday in the British Medical Journal, is the latest in a series of studies that question the value of annual breast X-rays for pre-menopausal women and whether too many women are being "overdiagnosed" by the popular test. 
 
 "We found absolutely no benefit in terms of reduction of deaths from the use of mammography," said study leader Dr. Anthony Miller, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health. 
 
 The controversial finding is unlikely to trigger an immediate change in national screening policies, although it will enliven an already heated debate over screening. Experts have been arguing the merits of breast X-rays since 2009, when a government panel recommended that most women under 50 could safely skip the test. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force determined that the chances that a 40-year-old woman would be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in the next 10 years was 1.44% and that her odds of dying from it were just 0.19%. 
 
 However, the breast cancers that strike women in their 40s are often more aggressive, and they account for about 17% of deaths from the disease, according to the American Cancer Society. 
 
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 The ACS and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommend annual mammograms for women beginning at age 40, and the National Cancer Institute advises women in their 40s to have the test once every year or two. The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care advises women to have mammograms every two to three years between the ages of 50 and 74. 
 
 The British Medical Journal report, based on data from the Canadian National Breast Screening Study, argues that mammography all too often finds small cancers that would never become dangerous if left alone. Roughly half of all cancers found by mammography — yet undetected through physical examination — fell into this category, the study authors wrote. 
 
 The researchers examined the medical records of 89,835 women in six Canadian provinces between the ages of 40 and 59. All of the trial participants received annual physical breast examinations, while half of them also had yearly mammogram screenings for five years, beginning in 1980. 
 
 Over the next 25 years, 3,250 of the 44,925 women in the mammography arm of the study were diagnosed with breast cancer, along with 3,133 of the 44,910 women in the control group. In addition, 500 patients in the mammography group died of breast cancer, as did 505 women in the control group. 
 
 The researchers found that women who got mammograms were more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer but that the test did not reduce their risk of dying from the disease. 
 
 The research team calculated that 22% of the cancers found on mammograms were overdiagnosed. That means that for every 424 women who were screened, one received unnecessary cancer treatment. 
 
 The study did not address the use of mammography as a diagnostic tool, which most experts agree is valuable. 
 
 In light of their findings, Miller and his colleagues concluded that "the rationale for screening by mammography should be urgently reassessed by policymakers." 
 
 The American College of Radiology, one of the leading critics of the task force recommendations, was quick to denounce the study's conclusions. The group said in a statement that the Canadian National Breast Screening Study was "deeply flawed" and "incredibly misleading." Among other problems, the study relied on "second-hand" mammography equipment that was operated by poorly trained technicians, the group said. 
 
 "It would be an outrage for women if access to screening was curtailed because of the poor results in the Canadian National Breast Screening Study," said Dr. Daniel Kopans, a senior breast imager at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "It has been known for years that the trial was compromised from the start." 
 
 The study authors said they stood by their conclusions and challenged the critics to produce data showing that mammograms reduced deaths. Other recent studies have found that advances in breast cancer treatment have eroded some of the benefits of early detection. 
 
 "Modern treatment is so much more effective now that the lead time gained by mammography has little impact on the outcome," Miller said. 
 
 Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, an epidemiologist and biostatistics professor at Dartmouth College's Geisel School of Medicine, said the study offered the highest-quality evidence yet on the prevalence of overdiagnosis. 
 
 "I think there's growing realization that all is not well with mammography," said Welch, who co-wrote the book "Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health." "People in the cancer community and the cancer surgery community are aware of the problem of overdiagnosis. They're aware that mammography was oversold, that its benefits were exaggerated and its harms were kind of downplayed." 
 
 In an editorial that accompanied the study, three breast cancer experts from the University of Oslo who have studied the effects of screening in Europe said Miller and his colleagues made a convincing case that current policies should be reconsidered. 
 
 "This is not an easy task, because governments, research funders, scientists and medical practitioners may have vested interests in continuing activities that are well established," they wrote. 
 
 Similar studies on mammography screening have been conducted in Europe, and critics have said that they don't apply to American women. The Canadian researchers said that their results are highly pertinent to the United States and that their study is probably the largest we will ever see. 
 
 "Many people believe you do not adopt policy on the result of one trial, and yet there's not likely to be another trial like this," Miller said. "It takes too long." 
 
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– The recommendation from the US Preventative Services Task Force that women in their 40s should not get mammograms is not government policy, said the secretary of Health and Human Services. Kathleen Sebelius tried to tamp down some of the controversy that has followed the panel’s decision, asserting that government insurance policies “remain unchanged. I would be very surprised if any private insurance company changed its mammography coverage decisions as a result of this action," she said. "My message to women is simple. Mammograms have always been an important life-saving tool in the fight against breast cancer, and they still are today," Sebelius said. Her attempt to distance the administration from the task force comes amid criticism from the American Cancer Society and even opponents of Democratic health care reform, notes CNN. "This is how rationing begins," said one Republican congresswoman.