All for the Breast

Last week a regional court in the Western German city of Darmstadt ruled that an insurance company was under no obligation to pay for a 37-year-old woman to decrease the size of her breasts.

The woman had sued after being advised by doctors that reducing the load up front might help chronic aches in the back.

But the court rejected her claim on the grounds that, at 116 kilograms for 178 centimeters, the patient was legally obese.

No doubt with jiggling images from Russ Meyer movies in mind, the judge ruled that insurers were only required to pay up if a patient's breasts were "grotesquely disproportional to the rest of the body."

A federal German court ruled back in 2004 that breast reduction and enhancement surgery did not fall under the aegis of state medical insurance coverage because there was "no norm for breast size or shape" -- presumably discounting the possibility of triangular or square mutations.

Bizarrely, German state insurers are, however, required to pay for therapy sessions to deal with the psychological trauma of being less than physically perfect -- even though counseling is far more expensive than cosmetic surgery.