Health to Pay

Not to indulge in useless contrarianism, but I disagree that Steyn wants anyone to get syphilis. Even as a polemic, it's somewhat dotty. Steyn just doesn't care one way or the other, and it's a convenient axe to grind, since Pelosi (per usual) allowed herself to be rope-a-doped into wasting valuable face time defending it.

These are obviously tough times, and it is difficult to defend the notion of tax dollars being spent to combat the results of poor impulse control. This does not make Steyn right in his assertions, simply selective, since we've been spending six times that amount in Iraq every week for years now, and Steyn couldn't care less. If anything, Steyn's blithe comparison of funding neighborhood initiatives with Saddam gassing Kurds is more obnoxious.

There are a great many physical conditions and diseases which are preventable -- STDs, AIDS, lung cancer, heart disease, obesity -- that the government does not regularly intercede in. On the one hand, it's a free society; everyone gets to go to hell in their own way. On the other hand, these are all quite easily preventable, and they cost the taxpayers and the private sector an enormous amount in health-care costs, and they can be addressed with various modes of positive intercession; for example, rather than simply sin-taxing everything that's "bad" for you, the revenue from said tax could be used to subsidize gym memberships.

Some corporations have even instituted wellness goals with bonuses and payouts for meeting certain quantifiable benchmarks (weight, body mass index, blood pressure, cholesterol). A large-scale system could conceivably be set up along those lines, which of course creates yet another level of bureaucracy, but again may mitigate some of the damage that our horrific excuse of a health-care industry has wrought. It is a system more geared to throwing money at catastrophic conditions, or enabling crazy indigents to breed like state-supported rabbits, than utilizing common-sense preventive methodologies to not only prolong life, but enhance the overall quality of it.

I realize that imputing sexual puritanism to the incessant finger-wagging of these people is easier to do, but Steyn's cobbling of half-thoughts and poached riffs is a broader indicator of just how dead even their own vision of "conservatism" really is. Guys like Steyn aren't even trying anymore; they're just rolling a dead hobo in an alley, hoping one more penny will fall out.