A Stitch in Haste

New York is preparing to hunt down the latest public health threat — diabetics:

Conceived after a sharp rise in diabetes deaths over the past 20 years, the plan would require medical labs to report to the city the results of a certain type of test that indicates how well individual patients are controlling their diabetes.

"There will be some people who will say, 'What business of the government is it to know that my diabetes is not in control?'" said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city's health commissioner.

The answer, he said, is that diabetes costs an estimated $5 billion a year to treat in New York and was the fourth leading cause of death in the city in 2003, killing 1,891.

Here we go again. What a sublime, almost artistic way to erode privacy rights — the reciprocal of the hypocrisy of sin taxes. With tobacco and similar taxes the government takes people's money to control them (i.e., they say they tax it to stop it, but of course they know they can't stop it so then it becomes "we tax it to finance the cost of dealing with it").

But with totalitarian healthcare, now the government gives money (or benefits) to control people. He who pays the piper controls the medical records apparently ("Well, since the government pays for diabetes treatment, it should have the power to minimize those costs, regardless of any privacy considerations..."). The fact that the healthcare benefits that the government provides come from the very same taxpayers who receive those benefits (in the aggregate, of course) simply reduces the state to a meddling middleman, a costly extra layer of bureaucracy and interference in private decisions and private lives.

As I blogged previously:

The government creates the moral hazard in the first place, then turns around and decries it — all the while escalating the tax-and-regulate, tax-and-subsidize, tax-and-ban, tax-and-control spiral and all the while defending the practice with Orwellian economic double-talk.

The fact that the government taxes us against our will is not a valid justification to seize, almost as if by Kelo-style eminent domain, our privacy rights just to save some money that should have been our money from the start.

The fact that diabetes is neither communicable nor the result of any moral or behavioral failure (like a sexually transmitted disease), makes the proposal all the more outrageous.

The proposal should be voted down, and challenged in court if enacted.

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UPDATE #2: Meanwhile, the city has also started a mandatory vaccination registry for schoolchildren. This may by less obnoxious than the diabetes hit list (the goal of the vaccination registry is to aid pediatricians, not health department or school bureaucrats), but still — the increasing tendency to require, by law, the accumulation by a bureaucracy of private health records is always ominous regardless of the circumstances or purported macroeconomic or adminstrative benefits.