Acupuncture in the United States Military and other boondoggles

First, I would like to recommend the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, published six times a year by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.  Alongside the regular features on mediums and fortunetellers exposed and ridiculed, and the reports on the various lake monsters that don’t inhabit our deeper waterways, there are many items of medical interest.

One such item that caught my eye this issue is a dissection of the mental and rational failures of an Army physician who embraced acupuncture and continues to actively promote it within the military medical system.  Apparently there is an established movement in the system to use acupuncture not only for chronic pain problems, but post-traumatic stress disorder as well.  To the extent that this occurs, our traumatized servicemen will only suffer more keenly for the lack of effective treatment for their symptoms of depersonalization, blunted affect, nightmares, and flashbacks.

To say that this diversion of scarce resources towards an ineffective treatment will cost the taxpayer dearly is to only state the obvious.  Military medicine makes up a large and growing segment of our military bills and we cannot afford to squander money and lives on bad remedies.

If there is any doubt in your mind that acupuncture is no more effective than placebo, I suggest you consult the extensive recent scientific literature on the subject.  There is a clear consensus that acupuncture and toothpick pressure are equally effective at relieving pain and other symptoms.

The second waste of government and taxpayer money currently being perpetrated on an unknowing public is the maintenance of the Guantanamo Bay prison, at a cost of 1.4 million dollars per inmate per year; most of the less than 150 inmates left are on hunger strikes at the present time.   At least sixty Yemenis could be released immediately, for lack of evidence of any wrongdoing, if it were not for the “unstable situation” in Yemen, what with Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula up in the  mountains and all.

The ones, the really bad ones like Mohammed Khatami, could be transferred to federal prisons in a few hours if a few common sense prison experts were consulted.  All could be tried in civilian court with no loss of our ability to convict them and send them away for a long time.  Currently, federal prisoners in maximum security cost about $34,000 a year to maintain.  The only impediment to the transfer and closure of Guantanamo is the Republican House and the filibustering Senate Republicans; if not for their with-holding the funds to complete the closure and prison transfer, it would already be done in 2009.

The third, and possibly worst, waste of tax dollars is Medicare Part D, the prescription drug insurance system for Medicare patients.  The problem that is built in to the system is that the federal administrators who are supposed to run the program are forbidden from negotiating with the drug companies to get discounts on large orders.  This is odd, because the military and the Veterans Administration are empowered to negotiate prices for preferred orders and do so frequently to save large amounts of money, most often without damaging medical care.

If Medicare were allowed to negotiate with drug companies to receive discounts for preferred orders, the savings would be immense–tens to hundreds of billions of dollars.  The fact that Medicare is not allowed to negotiate points to collusion between the Bush administration and the drug companies, and in fact there is other evidence that this was the case.  The only way the program can be changed is to get Democratic supermajorities in Congress– a difficult feat.

I am sure the reader can think of many other wastes of tax dollars, but there are few as egregious as these– blatant, and blatantly unnecessary.