James Joyner, over at Outside The Beltway, is running a post this morning and titled “Edwards opposes medical choice”. [1]
If John Edwards is elected president, Americans will have no choice [2] but go to the doctor when told.
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.
Most of the bloggers covering this one [3] are, understandably, focusing on the tyranny angle:
- Steven Taylor [4]: “If one doesn’t go to one’s annual whatever, will there be a fine? Will the CDC dispatch agents to your house to force the tests on you?”
- Jon Henke [5]: “Which one of John Edwards’ two Americas gets a freedom of choice and privacy that extends beyond the uterus?”
- Darleen Click [6]: “State nannyism doesn’t get much better than this.”
- Brennan [7]: “You want to get an abortion? That’s up to you. You want to decide not to go to the doctor? He’ll force ya to. Oh the freedom!”
- Ann Althouse [8]: “He’s so warmed up about the generous benefits he’s promising that he doesn’t even hear the repressiveness in his own statements.”
- Ron Chusid [9]: “A plan like this makes Edwards even more authoritarian than the current Republican Party.”
It strikes me, though, that Edwards is at least being honest about the trade-offs involved. If the government is going to be responsible for everyone’s health care (and at some point in the not-too-distant future, it will be) then it will naturally set all manner of preconditions for receiving treatment
It’s true; Edwards is being honest about the goal, here. In this process, he makes himself singularly unlikable. But it’s not just Edwards; It’s a goal that all those pushing government health care and in mind.
And James is conditionally correct; If … If… you make the assumption that government’s going to be taking over the responsibility from the individual, that would make sense. But is such a takeover desirable? there’s the issue. There is the question that none of the Democrats and too few of the Republicans, frankly, are even bothering to ask.
Even worse, those questions don’t even address the issue of the people who would be controlling such matters being the most incredibly corrupt group of people on the face of the planet… Democrats.