Here come the “food police” – all the usual media suspects are carrying the same story about a study published in “Nature Neuroscience” invovling feeding rats a diet of high calorie foods and noticing that the rats get fat….
Here is how one story starts….”The findings in a study of animals cannot be directly applied to human obesity, but…”
Here we go again – the story tries to make the case that obesity costs the United States $150 billion a year – the same theory the CDC floated a couple years ago, then had to retract. Fat people tend to die fast and cheaply, thereby reducing the costs to the medical system. It’s the tofu eaters who live to 110 sitting in a nursing home with alzheimers that run up Medicare’s costs….
In a Health Care Reform post-passage interview, I heard a doctor who was pro-reform give a radio interview with Mike Pintek on KDKA where he stated that he’s looking forward to “rational care” not “rationed care”. He went on to explain that rational care will mean not giving Lipitor (or other life extending drugs one must suppose) to patients with Alzheimers or other similar incurable diseases.
He seemed to genuinely think that this sort of approach would save a ton of money. He sounded happy that he would not be forced to try to keep people from dying, in a way. To me, it just sounded cold and unfeeling. But, I suppose he figures that the obesity problem in America will probably be fixed by this legislation and is just getting prepared for the onslought of healthy, skinny old people.
It’s just like “sin” taxes..cigarettes, soft drinks, gambling and so on – the government would be dead in the water if everyone changed the behavior the taxes are supposed to modify. Here in PA, cigarette taxes fund the CHIP (childrens health insurance). So, I’m thinking it’s my civic duty to start smoking “for the children”.
This goes along with Ezekiel Emmanuel’s white paper to the Hastings Institute, in which he stated clearly that care for those who are no longer useful to society (e.g. the elderly, the handicapped) would be put at the lowest priority or eliminated outright in order to make universal coverage available. This is how the discussion of “death panels” came in. Obama can deny their existence, but the mentality of those who crafted health care reform seems to indicate otherwise.
Eventually we’ll be drinking pop for the kids, eating beef for the kids, driving vehicles with combustible engines for the kids, buying non-sustainable/non-free-range/non-green/non-fair trade foods and building materials for the kids, etc.