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.
– 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.