Your Money or Your Life

by: Jurassicpork

That’s, literally, what it comes down to with today’s penny-wise, pound-foolish military. In a day and age in which one third of Iraq’s reconstruction funds are gobbled up by outfits like Blackwater USA and the Pentagon and our administration thinks nothing of handing out tens of billions in cost-plus, no-bid contracts to lazy, greedy GOP-friendly contractors and tamp hundreds of millions more down their bottomless throats in “incentive bonuses”, military doctors are actually telling our troops to not get life-saving genetic testing because it could disqualify them for equally life-saving medical benefits.

Take the case of former Army Ranger Eric Miller, for example.
Miller was diagnosed with Von Hippel-Lindau syndrome, which makes him extremely susceptible to tumors that often require surgery to remove. When he saw an Army doctor to have his back pain checked out, he got the bad news. Then it got worse. He was told his genetic defect was a “pre-existing condition”, a catch-all excuse that brings back to the minds of the issue-savvy the horrors of Chapter 5-13.

"Maybe they didn't want to foot the bill for my disability. It's saving money for them. I'm just one less soldier that they have to dish out compensation to," explains Miller.

The cruelly ironic thing is that it’s been determined by military medical boards hearing appeals cases that in some instances, these genetic defects, these “pre-existing conditions”, are actually triggered by the patients’ military duties. Mentioned in this LA Times article is a former helicopter pilot who was relegated to a desk job when she became too pregnant to fly.

Her new sedentary job actually contributed to her developing a blood clot in her leg and when she retired from the Army, she got nothing.

Such a medical board had also determined that certain genetic abnormalities could be triggered by repeated exposure to gun cleaning solvents. In other words, their jobs could make them sick and then the Army gets rid of them without any sense of responsibility, denying them the Tricare coverage that they’d need to treat their conditions.

Genetic discrimination? Some would say that it’s necessary, some would say that it smacks of Aldous Huxley.

Congress took action in 1996, banning genetic discrimination in group health plans, and in 2000, President Clinton signed an executive order forbidding the practice against the federal government's nearly 2 million civilian employees. Similar laws against genetic discrimination swept through 31 states.

Just to play Devil’s advocate here, it’s notable that the nation’s second most infamous draft dodger, someone who’d never served in the military, never sought to protect the other several million people serving the government in uniform, just as Clinton never protected the civil rights of gay soldiers with his contemptible “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Congress is currently working to craft a bill that would abolish genetic discrimination but it still wouldn’t cover military personnel.

In light of Eric Miller’s case, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” now applies to the genetically abnormal.

"If someone called me up with regard to genetic testing, I had to say, 'That might not be something you want to pursue,' " Nunes (a former Air Force geneticist) said. "That's very hard to say."

In her 26 years in the Air Force, Fries (another Air Force geneticist) said she often dissuaded women from getting tested for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations that dramatically increase their risk of developing breast cancer.

So much for the Hippocratic Oath. It’s now all about the bottom line every bit as it is with civilian HMO’s. And speaking of bottom lines, this means essentially that some of our men and women in uniform are put in the Heller-esque Catch-22 situation of refusing testing that could save their lives in order to preserve medical benefits that they can't use for fear of getting the boot.

And forget about seeking a civilian medical opinion: The UCMJ considers that a court martial offense.

But what do you expect from a military that tells Korean War veterans that they have to buy their own Purple Hearts?