Freedom from choice

Yikes. This post isn’t about politics, as candidates on all sides are throwing out very similar ideas, but this news story illustrates better than some what these ideas mean when taken to their logical conclusions. When we let our health become the responsibility of the government, then, of course, the government calls the shots about what we can and cannot do if it believes it is for our own good.

As the Associated Press reported:

Edwards backs mandatory preventive care

...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 example,] women would be required to have regular mammograms in an effort to find and treat "the first trace of problem."...

The blog world is a buzz over the idea Americans would have no choice but to go to the doctor when told, focusing on the tyranny aspects. An interesting discussion is going on at Protein Wisdom, looking at where we are heading and what this will mean. Darleeen created this IRS form as a poignant illustration.

As the government begins mandating “acceptable health standards and practices,” she wrote, soon it will “outlaw tobacco and transfats, then regulate and ration white sugar, red meat, dairy and how many times annually one can visit fast food restaurants.”

What choice will we have if we and our doctor don’t believe preventive wellness programs — complete with weight loss, statins, drugs to manage health indices, screening tests, low-fat vegetarian diets, etc. — have the best science behind them or are best for us? What if we don’t want to do what they say? Will the CDC dispatch agents to our homes if we haven’t taken our pills, had the required lab tests or shown up at the doctor at the prescribed time? Check out the comments, including Mark’s about how these mandatory tests, diets and medications will be enforced and the consequences for our loss of medical privacy and control over our bodies.

Freedom from choice is what we want?