Because you will go to the doctor when he tells you to

TIPTON, Iowa - 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.

Sounds nice in a “let’s all sit in the trees and sing Joan Baez songs to each other” sort of way.  But once one begins to consider the ramifications of such a policy, it begins to sound a little...scary

Imagine, for a moment, that Edwards gets his way and America goes to a national health care system that is funded by all of the taxpayers and requires people who use the system get regular checkups from a doctor to ensure that said taxpayers aren’t laying out cash for people who won’t take care of themselves by going to the doctor.  My question is this: Is Edwards really expecting us to believe that his health care system won’t pay for someone’s cancer treatments simply because they hadn’t been in to the doctor in a couple of years?

If that’s true, how is that any different from the current system where people who refuse to get jobs and secure their own health insurance aren’t given care?

Plus, if Edwards can make doctors visits a prerequisite for getting government-paid-for health care, doesn’t that set the framework for other prerequisites as well?  Like government-monitored exercise regimes and diets?  Sure that sounds absurd and abnormal to us now, but then doesn’t government-mandated doctor’s visits sound sort of absurd and abnormal too?  Where would the health care do-gooding of Edwards and his fellow liberals end?

Not to put too sinister an edge on this, but do we really want to find out?

I’m reminded of a C.S. Lewis quote:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

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