Numbers Game: New Pentagon Numbers Raise Health Care Worries (NPR-listen/transcript)

[Dover]

From Sunday, Feb. 4 - NPR's All Things Considered

Listen - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7165869

New Pentagon Numbers Raise Health Care Worries

Last month, Harvard professor Linda Bilmes presented a paper at a meeting of social scientists about the cost of treating injured soldiers. She reported that 50,000 American troops had been wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A few days later she got a call from a senior Pentagon official.

"The assistant secretary for Health of the DOD phoned me up asked me where I had found the numbers, and I faxed him his own Web site and that was the last I heard from them," Bilmes says.

Now both the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs have changed the number of wounded on their Web sites.

The Pentagon says the more accurate number is 23,000, and that this lower number simply makes a distinction between injuries of combat and other health problems, like the stomach flu.

Bilmes says that using the bigger number gives a more realistic picture of the health care that's going to be needed...cont'd

Full Transcript - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7165869

[Dover]

1. Kind of interesting what the transcript leaves out (from the radio version)

It leaves out the testimony by the Nat.Guard medic/soldier (Patrick Campbell) about his nightmares and bouts of uncontrollable crying.

As far as I can tell, that's the only thing they left out of the transcript.

BTW, here's the group Campbell says he is affiliated with - http://www.iava.org/index.php
I'm going to give it it's own post.