Posted by
ApolloSpeaks on Monday, August 10, 2009 1:53:17 PM
TOTALITARIAN MEDICINE
Andrew Weil, a noted herbalist and alternative medicine professional, writing in today's Huffington Post (see ) commented about the health care debate and suggested a solution saying: "What's tragically missing from the debate is a diagnosis of the real, far more fundamental problem than rising health care costs. What's missing is the fact that American health care doesn't fulfill its prime directive -- it does not help people become or stay healthy. It's not a health care system at all; it's a disease management system, and making the current system cheaper and more accessible will just spread the dysfunction more broadly."
Now a system that cures disease and helps us stay healthy once we are healed sounds like a terrific idea in theory until you think out its concrete implications. For unless the government micromanages everyone's lifestyle: what we eat and drink, how we exercise and take our pleasures (sexual excess can be destructive to one's health) Weil's idea wouldn't get off the ground. In fact, for his system to work it would have to be crushingly oppressive, a form of health care tyranny or totalitarian medicine as we would lose our freedoms to big brother diet nazis and health care fascists in Washington. Indeed, in Weil's heath care heaven we the public would be ruled by busy body bureaucrats or federal, state and local medical police who'd be monitoring and regulating every aspect of our lives: telling us what we can and cannot think* or do, then punishing us with banishment from the system (possibly leaving us to die), or maybe sending us to medical reeducation camps to learn health care correctness, if we disobey and get sick. Without this kind of coercion how else could Weil's system work?
In short, Weil's intrusive system would be a monstrous violation of our privacy rights; a tradeoff of bodily health and long life (which can't be guaranteed) for the death of individual liberty and the right to choose our way to happiness and the good life. When President Obama said at his news conference that under Obamacare "people would no longer pay for things that don't make them healthy" he must have had something like Dr. Weil's remedy in mind.
HELL NO WE WON'T GO DOWN THE ROAD TO HEALTH CARE TYRANNY!
*Unhealthy thoughts and emotions could weaken the immune system and make one sick and must not be indulged in. We must all be "very Obama," Obama cool to avoid psychosomatic disorders.