Though he doesn’t heed his own advice, New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg has no hesitation forcing others to live by it.
Emboldened by successful drives to reduce smoking, obesity and the use of trans fats in New York city, mayor Michael Bloomberg today opened a new front in healthy living for New Yorkers by launching a campaign to reduce consumption of salt.
If a politician can grab this kind of power from a non-health care political office, imagine the kind of power he’d wield if he were appointed to a seat on some future nationalized Health Care Panel charged with making policy decisions about who gets what kind of medical care.
‘Personal responsibility’ and ‘disease prevention’ loom large in the current national health care reform debate. But what if ‘personal responsibility’ became a condition for obtaining medical care? A history of good behavior gave someone a pass to the head of the medical treatment line, while bad behavior relegated one to the end of the line or out of the queue altogether?
Who would define ‘good’ and ‘bad’? Politicians, of course. And that should terrify everyone regardless of his or her political persuasion.