Here’s how the Nanny State becomes the Bully State under ObamaCare NaziCare. The new Statist health care plan operates under the following assumptions:
- Most of the health care burden is driven by disease that results from lifestyle decisions.
- Most of the health care burden is therefore, in theory, preventable.
- The cost of most lifestyle-related disease is not recovered from the individuals with such diseases or from the industries whose products contribute to these diseases.
- Individual autonomy cannot be the paramount value in health care.
- Individual choice as a basis for health is ‘too simplistic’.
- Individual freedoms may have to give way to the coercive power of the State.
- Interventions, including coercive actions, to change behaviour may proceed in the absence of evidence of their effectiveness.
- Individuals have a clear responsibility to refrain from lifestyle decisions that lead to disease and, consequently, treatment can be denied to those who refuse to change their behaviour.
Every libertarian and libertarian-leaning American should be downright frightened.
Why? Because this is the basis of a police state through all of the enforcement mechanisms in the ObamaCare NaziCare bill. Says Bruce McQuain at Questions and Observations:
For those of you who can manage to look at the health care bill objectively and have listened to descriptions of what it requires should have absolutely no problem understanding that the list of new assumptions are clearly evident in that bill. One only has to think “individual mandate” to know that the assumption “individual autonomy cannot be the paramount value in health care” is being acted upon. The hiring of 16,000 new IRS agents to enforce that mandate speaks to the assumption “individual freedoms may have to give way to the coercive power of the State”.
So it certainly isn’t at all a leap to also understand that at some point, to keep this from being another in a long line of centrally planned failures, the attempt to intervene and change behavior and to coercively enforce the “responsibility” to refrain from lifestyle decision which lead to disease and the consequent health care costs, will be acted upon. The Nanny state becomes the Bully state.
And for those of you who would wave this away with a “this can’t happen here”, I’ll simply remind you of what was signed into law yesterday and the fact that some of the assumptioins listed above, as I’ve pointed out, have already been acted upon.
One of the commenters at QandO mentions the 10 percent tanning bed tax. It’s been decided that somewhere tanning beds pose a risk to those who use them, so King George III Our Lord and Savior Barack Hussein Obama and Parliament the tyrannical thugs in Congress decide to impose a tax to discourage behavior of which they disapprove.
How long until that is extended to any type of lifestyle choice or food and beverage which our new overlords decide isn’t in our best interest to either engage in or consume?
Remember the 17,000 Gestapo thugs authorized in the ObamaCare NaziCare legislation. The enforcers. These are the ones that will show up at your door should you be unable or unwilling to (1) comply with the unconstitutional individual mandate and (2) be unable or unwilling to pay the fine that the state will impose on you. Prepared to haul you off to the Democrats’ Statists’ version of Auschwitz, a federal prison, for five years and impose another $25,000 fine on you for noncompliance and nonpayment of previously imposed fines.
Liberty Works has more on the enforcement mechanism here.
This is a tax on living, unlike state-mandated auto insurance, which applies only if you drive and have access to or own a car. No one forces you to do either. But you are required to live and breathe, unless you have assumed room temperature. No freedom loving society should or will tolerate a tax on your very existence. All the jokes about Democrats Statists wanting to tax the air you breathe just became reality Sunday.
Should this come to pass, I firmly believe it will be the enforcement that will trigger another American Revolution, as freedom-loving Americans will not stand by idly and allow themselves to be carted off to the gulags for not complying with unconstitutional mandates and fines.
I say, bring it on. Or as Al Bundy would say, Let’s rock.
[...] remember what we wrote about the Bully State here: One of the commenters at QandO mentions the 10 percent tanning bed tax. It’s been decided that [...]