Is "Calling Out" Citizens Part of the President's Job?

Last night I watched the president's speech on healthcare—the first of his televised speeches I've had the heart to endure. And I watched to see if he said anything about "prevention" or "personal responsibility for one's own health" as a key variable in his plan to "fix" healthcare. And he didn't.

His plan seems to be, "Companies, you are free to call anything you want 'food' and offer it to Americans to eat, regardless of whether it is good or bad for one's health. And citizens, you are free to eat whatever you want and live however you want without negating your right to have unlimited amounts of money spent in an attempt to clean up the mess you create." (I am well aware that there are individual cases of illness and need that occur apart from a cause-effect scenario for which individuals can be deemed accountable. But those relatively few cases have not created the healthcare problem in America.)

The president's focus seems to be on the healthcare "system," not the health and well-being of individuals. It's a well-known fact that America spends more money per capita on "healthcare" (read "disease management") than any nation in the world, but ranks way down the list in terms of actual health. We are number one in trauma care, but in the "30's" (last time I checked) in "healthiness." It seems that the president's plan is focused on the "per capita" problem: How do we spend less money per capita on healthcare and move America's ranking higher among the developed nations of the world? We could spend less money and still have a nation full of unhealthy people. The per capita number would be better but it wouldn't change the health of people.

But the national goal ought not to be having the most efficient "system" of doctors, insurance companies, drug companies, and government. It ought to be to have the healthiest people. That's why this whole debate is mislabeled. It's not a healthcare debate, it's a disease-care debate. The focus is on sickness, not health.

What I learned last night was that anyone who (in the president's opinion) mis-characterizes his healthcare plan will be "called out" by his administration. But after hearing a commentator on the radio yesterday read a section of one of the developing plans, there's no way people will agree on what it means. It's hard to agree on something that can't be understood by the average citizen. So if, in the president's opinion, your interpretation of what he is saying is different than his, you will be called out and identified. Is this part of the president's job description—calling out citizens who disagree with him?

I would rather the president call out individuals who are not doing their best to live a healthy life—beginning with his own need to stop smoking. My son, Daniel, sent me a link to a post on the healthcare debacle that says it well (from the blog of retired philosophy professor Dr. Bill Vallicella—reprinted here without his permission):

The problem here is the liberal mentality. Faced with a problem such as obesity, the liberal wants to classify it as a public health problem -- which is absurd on the face of it. No doubt there are public health problems, and some of them are getting worse because of a failure to control the borders; but obesity is an individual problem to be solved (or left unsolved) by the individual and perhaps a few significant others. If obesity counts as a public health problem, then how could any health problem not count as a public health problem?

Here is the straight skinny on obesity: if you consume more calories than you burn, then you gain weight. If you burn more calories than you consume, then you lose weight. So if you want to lose weight, eat less and move more. Try it. It works. Of course there are people with special conditions. But I'm talking about the general run of the population. For the most part, people are fat because they refuse to discipline themselves. Liberals aid and abet them in their indiscipline. I am tempted to say that that is part of the very definition of a liberal. The liberal tendency is to shift responsibility from the agent and displace it onto factors external to the agent. So it's Burger King's fault that you have clogged arteries, not your fault. Nonsense on stilts.

The problem with liberals is not that they are stupid, but thay they stupefy themselves with their political correctness.