According to Senator Tom Coburn, the CDC is a textbook example of a government health bureaucracy that has grown larger and larger while becoming less and less effective. Per the Washington Times:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wastes millions of dollars on “failed prevention efforts, international junkets and lavish facilities,” a Republican senator says in a lengthy oversight report.

The CDC, originally created during WWII to control malaria, has developed into a gigantic bureaucracy that spends money like crazy. Yet, according to Coburn’s report, its results are less than stellar:

The CDC spent $5 billion in the past seven years on HIV/AIDS prevention, with the goal of cutting the annual HIV infections in half by 2006. However, the number of new HIV cases remains steady at 40,000 a year.

The CDC record on other targeted diseases is equally unimpressive:

In 2000, Congress boosted syphilis-prevention funding from $18.8 million to $33 million and has spent that much more every year since. But since 2000, syphilis cases have jumped from 6,158 to 8,953 in 2005.

This is what bureaucracies are about folks. They are good for two things: self-perpetuation and wasting money. If we turn our entire health system over to federal apparatchiks, this is the kind of nonsense we’ll get.