Via Acidman, I just read a story at NRO that gives me a good case of the heebie-jeebies:

In mid-January, the city began legally requiring laboratories that do medical testing to report to the Health Department the results of blood-sugar tests for city residents with diabetes — along with the names, ages, and contact information on those patients.

City officials are not only analyzing these data to assess patterns and changes in diabetes prevalence in the city, but are planning “interventions.” Simply put, diabetics will soon receive letters and phone calls from city officials offering advice and counsel on how to effectively deal with their medical condition. If you wish to keep your medical data confidential, you cannot. If you want to avoid the “interventions,” you can go online and fill out forms requesting that you not be contacted — that is, if you even know the program exists, and you have the sophistication and technology to access the government’s “do not contact” forms. (None of the New York City newspapers have done any in-depth coverage of this new regulation and its implications.)

The first thought this story caused is the obvious one, and it should send every single New Yorker racing to get the people who passed this law removed from office, now. If there’s not an election soon enough to get them out, go demand a recall election. Get them gone.

They came for the smokers, and we did nothing to fight them. They’re coming for the diabetics now, and if we do nothing, then they’ll come from the people with cancer, or the people with heart disease. Or maybe they’ll come for the people who’re ostensibly healthy, but who have a family history of these diseases. This is not the proper role of government. One little piece at a time, they’re chipping away at our privacy and our freedoms, all in the name of the public good. There is an element of this society that, if it had its way, would turn us into nothing more than this*, mindless puppets who don’t get sick, and who avoid all but the most basic maintenance costs, but who have absolutely no free choice in anything we do.

The second thing that occurred to me is that this is probably more motivated by monetary concerns than any real concern for the person’s health. The government has forced the citizens into taking care of our fellow man (whether we want to or not). The irony of this is that when the government realizes how much of “its” money (which is, in reality, the money of citizens) it’s spending to help people out, it gets miserly, too! And because it’s The Government, it can just go in and force people to live healthier (and if these were actually only those specific people whose healthcare it was paying for, I’m not sure I’d have a problem with this, anyway, but it appears to be everyonecan’t be designed) to be a force for good. Government represents nothing more than order, and it is at its best when that is all it attempts to do. The government should protect us from external threats. It should prosecute crimes that involve infringements on our rights (murders, thefts, rapes, etc.). It should mediate disputes between citizens. I’m even willing to accept that it should maintain infrastructure like roads. It is not here to take care of you. It cannot be your friend or your family. Those are the people who should be the first place you turn when you need assistance. If they can’t*** or won’t help, you should then turn to volunteer organizations, people who genuinely want to help. Because when you allow yourself to be assisted by the government, you become its property! Worse yet, you cause even those who aren’t asking for help to also become the government’s property, because it makes us its slaves, forcing us to work for less.

New Yorkers have to be worried about this particular law, but Americans as a whole should be worried about the philosophy it represents, and we should make a stand against it now, before there’s no one left to make a stand when they come for us.

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* þ Hog On Ice, which had a decidedly different spin on the “female android”**.

** Technically, that would be a “gynoid”, I think, but both Steve and the original article called her a female android.

*** If they can’t help, don’t you have to wonder if that’s possibly because there’s a loaded weapon pointed at their heads forcing them to give money to other people instead of you?