I wish I’d been in the room for the meeting where the bureaucrats decided it was important to reiterate that Medicare will not be paying for Transcendental Meditation for old people. I picture them carefully weighing the benefits — including the fact that many Baby Boomers may derive some terrific placebo effect from TM — and the potential harmful side effects, including thinking the Beatles were Really Profound. But in fact, it turns out there is a whole body of scientific literature devoted to proving that TM reduces hospital admissions. For example, there would be 37 percent fewer “genital/urinary” hospital admits if the government just paid for a little Om here and there. The scientific papers cited appear to be all written by David Orme-Johnson PhD from Maharishi University of Management, the author of over 100 articles on the medical benefits of meditation. My favorite is the paper that shows that TM decreases the brain’s response to pain. Basically, they stuck some people who had practiced TM for a long time into an MRI and then “thermally induced” pain elsewhere on their body, then compared the brain images with people who hadn’t practiced TM. How could the bean counters not have jumped at the chance to fund TM for all seniors? But actually, the folks at MUM should be happy. If Medicare did decide to pay for TM, then the next thing you know there would be JCAHO accreditation, licensure, standards, regulations saying exactly how round each mandala must be, and maybe even an RFP to open up the meditation business to the lowest bidder. You’d end up with government-sponsored TM classes run by HealthSouth. So count your blessings along with your inward breaths!