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Sister Toldjah has a small article on her former Senator, John Edwards, supposedly one of the first tier of candidates for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination:
- John Edwards: If I give you “free” healthcare, you better use it
The Associated Press reports:
Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards said on Sunday that his universal health care proposal would require that Americans go to the doctor for preventive care.
“It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.”
He noted, for example, that women would be required to have regular mammograms in an effort to find and treat “the first trace of problem.” Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, announced earlier this year that her breast cancer had returned and spread.
Edwards said his mandatory health care plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care. The plan would include mental health care as well as dental and vision coverage for all Americans.
“The whole idea is a continuum of care, basically from birth to death,” he said.
Yeah, because he really, really cares about the poor. That’s when he’s not using them to feather his own nest, anyway.
Well, it’s Labor Day, and I can understand that Sis didn’t want to spend too much time going over the ramifications of this, but it seems to me that Senator Edwards’ speech in Iowa is hugely important: he said, in effect, you will have government health care coverage and you will do as we tell you to do — and you will like it!
So, whay if somebody decides that he doesn’t really want to go to the dentist every six months? Will Mr Edwards’ health care plan send the gendarmes after him, and force him into the chair? After all, we all know that if you don’t get your regular cleanings, you are likely to develop periodontal disease, and you could lose some or all of your teeth — and that can be more expensive to treat.
What if someone with diabetes chooses not to visit the doctor regularly? Such would be unwise behavior, but it certainly happens — and lack of discipline among diabetics can lead to a lot of nasty and more expensive complications. Do the gendarmerie get regular reports from physicians about patients who miss their appointments?
John Edwards’ line might have been a bit of a throw-away one, in the heat of a political campaign he’s trying hard to win, but it exposes the essentially authoritarian nature into which a government-paid health care plan would eventually have to go. As I noted in How the left thinks, if the government is going to assume all health care costs, then the government will have both an interest in and a responsibility to reduce those costs.
I noted the actions of Weyco, a company in Michigan which is trying to reduce its health care costs by mandating that none of its employees smoke.
Not that they can’t smoke at work, but that they can’t smoke period; they must either quit smoking or lose their jobs.
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- If government is going to be obligated for health care costs, government has a reasonable right to take steps to lower those costs; then
- Government has a reasonable right to lower the costs for which it has assumed responsibility; and thus
- Government has a reasonable right to regulate private behavior which contributes to higher costs.
There are plenty of people who seem to find themselves in the business of regulating private conduct. We see it most obviously when it comes to tobacco: several major cities have major bans on smoking in public places and even private clubs. One company, Weyco in Michigan, has not only banned smoking on its property, it has banned smoking among its employees . . . even at home.
Weyco doesn’t see any problem with banning all of its employees from smoking, even off the premises, even in the privacy of their own homes, and has enforced the policy through at least three terminations. “There’s not a liberty right or any other right to have any particular employment, and I think it’s time for people in our country to start taking personal responsibility for many aspects of their life, including health care,” said David Houston, Weyco’s general counsel.¹
Well, if Weyco, a private company², can regulate its employees’ liberties to the extent that they cannot both smoke and remain employees, why couldn’t the federal government, if it were responsible for all health care costs, determine that Americans (all covered by the national health insurance so many advocate) simply couldn’t be allowed to smoke?
Or eat fatty foods?
Or make any of the other private choices Americans are wont to make that don’t necessarily have the best of consequences?
The real problem with Mr. Cohn’s logic is that it is unassailable: he’s actually right about this!
Smoking is the most obvious case, and there are plenty of people who advocate government stepping in and making the use of tobacco illegal, period. The fat police (and the ambulance chasers who Mr. Cohn noted were now following pizza delivery boys) have declared war against fatty foods, and if lawsuits against McDonald’s haven’t been successful yet — nearly 90 percent of Americans say they oppose obesity lawsuits against the food industry — it wasn’t all that long ago that the notion that tobacco companies being responsible for smokers’ illnesses, being that smoking was a private decision, was considered ridiculous. If the current lawsuit fails, which it probably will, there will be another, and another, until some idiot jury decides that someone is too fat not because of his hand-to-mouth disease, but because McDonald’s forced him to eat that food!
Count on it: federal government action against food producers and restaurants that serve fatty foods won’t be far behind, at least not if government has a huge vested interest in health care costs.
The arguments of the liberals for federal universal health insurance all sound just so good, so compassionate: nobody would be devastated by huge health care costs, people would be able to see doctors before they got really sick rather than having to go through emergency rooms, all of the things like that. But such coverage is not only the invitation for government to further regulate our private choices, it is virtually the requirement for government to further regulate our private choices.
John Edwards, in a moment of unexpected and unusual honesty, admitted such: his health care plan will require you to go to the doctor for regular check-ups, to avoid greater costs in the future. Oh, it isn’t actually written down anywhere, because Mr Edwards’ health care plan is a campaign document, not actual proposed legislation, and if he is elected, the enabling legislation will have to be hammered out — a process that could take years — and the Congress will balk, at least initially, on any such totalitarian controls. Who knows, even the American Civil Liberties Union, which declined to take up employees’ cases against Weyco, might resist that! But eventually, as costs escalate, the government that pays for health care will have to take measures to lower costs — and the most obvious measure (other than tort reform, which the Democrats, especially Mr Edwards, will never support) is controlling the unhealthy actions that individuals take.
After all, forcing us to eat less fat, requiring us to go to the doctor and the dentist regularly, and making sure that we eat our green beans, why those things are good for us, right? When your grandmother insisted that you clean your plate, including those vile lima beans, before you were allowed up from the dinner table, she was doing it for your own good, so why shouldn’t the government do the same?
Most of the readers of OpEdNews are on the political left, and universal health care coverage is a big issue with my friends on the left. But there is also a lot of support for libertarian positions, a hatred of government regulation of our lives. You've got to realize: the more that the government does for you, the more the government has to control you! Those two things are simply inseparable.
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¹ - I found one report, on a blog by Dr Michael Siegel, a physician who specializes in preventive medicine and public health and is now a professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department, Boston University School of Public Health, which claimed that Weyco has instiituted a $1,000 charge on employees whose spouses smoke. Unfortunately, Dr Siegel’s internal links to documentation have expired, and I could find no further corroboration.
² - On August 17, 2006, Weyco was acquired by Meritain Health, Inc., a division of health care services company Prodigy Health Group. Looking through Meritain’s website, I was unable to come up with anything regarding the smoking policies.
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Cross posted (in slightly different form) on my website, Common Sense Political Thought.
