Don't think we haven't fully gotten into the world of Demolition Man and Big Brother? Think again. The head of the CDC thinks government should take over your life to control obesity:
There are multiple accounts this morning of the Centers for Disease Control calling for taxes on food and soda pop in order to pay for health care reform.
They said obese people spend 40 percent more -- or $1,429 more per year -- in healthcare costs than people of normal weight.
"It is critical that we take effective steps to contain and reduce the enormous burden of obesity on our nation," Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a news conference at a CDC obesity meeting where the study was presented.
"Reversing obesity is not going to be done successfully with individual effort," Frieden said. "It will be done successfully as a society."
The CDC outlined 24 new recommendations on how communities can combat obesity in their neighborhoods and schools by encouraging healthier eating and more exercise.
Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee and chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Foresty, said the report underscores why prevention and wellness efforts must be part of any plan to reform the U.S. health system.
"Report after report shows that if we fail to take meaningful steps now on prevention of chronic disease like obesity, healthcare costs will continue to spiral out of control," Harkin said in a statement.
Excuse me...if people choose to eat more, then they are making that decision on their own and are accepting the consequences. How does what they do affect all of America if they, as the study says, are paying their own increased care? What are we doing here, really? We are making a case for control of more of your own personal life, and more of you as merely a money engine for social and governmental programming by the oligarchs in Washington! They are already talking soda and fat content taxes:
Key among the "interventions" the report weighs is that of imposing an excise or sales tax on fattening foods. That, says the report, could be expected to lower consumption of those foods. But it would also generate revenues that could be used to extend health insurance coverage to the uninsured and under-insured, and perhaps to fund campaigns intended to make healthy foods more widely available to, say, low-income Americans and to encourage exercise and healthy eating habits.
If anti-tobacco campaigns are to be the model, those sales taxes could be hefty: The World Health Organization has recommended that tobacco taxes should represent between two-thirds and three-quarters of the cost of, say, a package of cigarettes; a 2004 report prepared for the Department of Agriculture suggested that, for "sinful-food" taxes to change the way people eat, they may need to equal at least 10% to 30% of the cost of the food.
And although 40 U.S. states now impose modest extra sales taxes on soft drinks and a few snack items, the Urban Institute report suggests that a truly forceful "intervention" -- one that would drive down the consumption of fattening foods and, presumably, prevent or reverse obesity -- would have to target pretty much all the fattening and nutritionally empty stuff we eat: "With a more narrowly targeted tax, consumers could simply substitute one fattening food or beverage for another," the reports says.
It is not about your health. It is not about helping you or society. It is about control. It is about controlling your life as well making money off of you to support social and governmental spending and experimentation.
