A Stitch in Haste

"I told them I eat what I want to eat and the hell with them."
--John Johnson, 61, West Virginia Medicaid recipient.

To elaborate:

Ignoring doctors' orders may now start exacting a new price among West Virginia's Medicaid recipients. Under a reorganized schedule of aid, the state, hoping for savings over time, plans to reward "responsible" patients with significant extra benefits or — as critics describe it — punish those who do not join weight-loss or antismoking programs, or who miss too many appointments, by denying important services.

Granted, Medicaid — which is redistributionist welfare pure and simple — is a somewhat different creature from Medicare or from nanny-state health management initiatives such as smoking bans, restricting junk food ads or tracking diabetics. But the underlying rationale (i.e., rationalization) of the West Virginia proposal — to require "correct" health care choices — is the same: It's the government's money, so the government gets to decide how it will be spent.

But of course there is no such thing as "the government's money." There is only taxpayers' money. As I explained in this post: the government taxes you, then gives (some of) the money back to you, but only if you behave yourself like a good little citizen.

So the government turns itself not only into a rod-wielding governess or tsk-tsking Nurse Ratched, but also into a petty middleman — a moneychanger at the hospital instead of the Temple.

Again, since Medicaid recipients are by definition not significant taxpayers, the idea of attaching strings to taxpayer money for their health care may seem "less unreasonable" in a myopic, context-dropping sense. But no advocate of government-run or even government-financed health care will stop there. Medicare will be next, and if anything comparable to Hillarycare ever comes to pass in America, then it will apply to us all. Take our money, give back some of it, and strip our personal autonomy in the process. And all the while telling us it's "for our own good."

This, to its advocates, somehow constitutes "enlightened" health care policy.

Madness. Sheer madness.

(Via Kevin, M.D.)

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Somewhat off-topic:

Brittney Lovejoy, 18, earns $5.40 an hour at the Burger King here and is a Medicaid patient at the Lincoln center, as are her 4-year-old daughter and 6-month-old son.

Arithmetic can be very scary sometimes. Of course, any suggestion that a good way to save Medicaid money would be by bribing people like Ms. Lovejoy into receiving long-term contraceptive implants would be met with shock and indignation. Go figure.