Condescending and Paternalistic--Coming to a Doctor Near You?

UPDATE below

Proponents of socialized medicine or single-payer health insurance necessarily assume government is more effective and efficient than marketplace competition. Forget the fact that they forgot that fact when critiquing the Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina. More importantly, for many reasons, they're wrong. But even were they right, I still prefer a marketplace solution--because, as I noted only last week, monopolies constrain consumer choice, effects accentuated when yoked to the compulsion of state power.

Three items from last week's news illustrate my concern. First, Sunday's Telegraph reports on a socialist medicine giant, the U.K.'s National Health Service:

A pregnant woman has been told that her baby will be taken from her at birth because she is deemed capable of "emotional abuse", even though psychiatrists treating her say there is no evidence to suggest that she will harm her child in any way.

Social services' recommendation that the baby should be taken from Fran Lyon, a 22-year-old charity worker who has five A-levels and a degree in neuroscience, was based in part on a letter from a paediatrician she has never met.

Hexham children's services, part of Northumberland County Council, said the decision had been made because Miss Lyon was likely to suffer from Munchausen's Syndrome by proxy, a condition unproven by science in which a mother will make up an illness in her child, or harm it, to draw attention to herself.

As Don Surber observes,

"[F]ree" childbirth means your baby becomes a ward of the state. My advice to Miss Lyon is seek asylum in the United States. It is where Canada sends its pregnant mums when they are having quadruplets because it lacks neonatal beds. Gotta "save" money somewhere.

Second, NHS made Daily Mail headlines just two weeks ago:

A Second World War veteran who survived the Dunkirk evacuation died after contracting a superbug at a NHS hospital following a routine operation.

His daughter says he was dismayed by the dirty conditions he faced at the hospital in the weeks leading to his death.

Finally, apparently inspired, Democrat John Edwards invited a British healthcare invasion:

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.

Edwards said his mandatory health care plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care. The plan would include mental health care as well as dental and vision coverage for all Americans.

"The whole idea is a continuum of care, basically from birth to death," he said.

Edwards could be right--if "birth" includes transferring the newborn to foster care. Don Singleton asks:

Would over weight people be forced to lose weight? What would happen if they do not; would they be sent to prison? What about smokers? Would they be forced to stop smoking? [NOfP note: no--in the world of socialized medicine, smokers are the new uninsured!] . . . Would people that don't floss enough be penalized by their dentists?

Betsy Newmark agrees:

What's the penalty for not going in for your checkup? And how will the government know if you've gone or haven't gone? Will our doctors have to file reports on their patients' pattern of visits?

Edwards says his plan will cost only $120 billion annually--paid for by class warfare: "ending President Bush's tax cuts to people who make more than $200,000 per year." Edwards' estimate is absurd --in 2004, the states on average spent $5,313 per year per covered individual, which translates into about $ 1.594 trillion if applied across America. And Edwards also ignores current plans for enormously expanded, and expensive, government-provided healthcare. By the way, about 3 million tax returns reported a gross income at or over $200,000--so Edwards is proposing to increase those filers' taxes by $40,000 per return.

Even if the funding could be found, ML Jones spots the underlying issue:

What is being lost here is the tradition of freedom. Or maybe the illusion of it. The idea that a government will make doctor visits MANDATORY is absurd. I know, I know; it’s to save me from myself. My own negligence will no longer be tolerated by the state. Because the state loves me more than I love myself.

Ann Althouse has a scarier thought:

So, the mental health check is mandatory too? Why does he not even realize how bad that sounds? He's so warmed up about the generous benefits he's promising that he doesn't even hear the repressiveness in his own statements.

According to Captain's Quarters, the Edwards plan:

[R]eveals the increased authoritarian attitude that government-run health care produces. . . What happens when someone fails a mental health exam? More importantly, who sets the standards for failure? Will government start considering those who oppose its system of forced health delivery as mentally unfit to live in the general population? The Soviet Union used a system of asylums to detain political dissidents, whom the state declared insane for their protestations against Communist ideals.

It won't take long before government uses its responsibility to start dictating most of life's decisions. Mayor Mike Bloomberg already has outlawed trans fats in restaurants in New York City; when government takes on the cost of health care, most dietary choices will disappear across the nation. Using the high cost of maintenance as an excuse, government will intrude further and further into the private decisions of Americans until we can no longer consider ourselves a free people. Big Brother will dictate the narrow set of options available to us.

Well, yes--but when you're condescendingly paternalistic, as present progressives are, that's a feature, not a bug.

MORE:

AVI presents good arguments against alarmism about the "Fran Lyon baby" case.

(via Instapundit, Albany Media Bias)