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The Health Care Trojan Horse May Now Have Its Achilles

May 17, 2009, 5:49 pm

Via Jacob Sullum:

Today President Obama appointed Thomas Frieden, New York City's crusading health commissioner, as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Frieden, an infectious disease specialist who is known mainly as an enthusiastic advocate of New York's strict smoking ban, heavy cigarette taxes, trans fat ban, and mandatory calorie counts on restaurant menu boards, embodies the CDC's shift from illnesses caused by microbes to illnesses caused by lifestyle choices.

Explanation of the health care Trojan Horse here.  More articles here.

Tags:
Category: Health Care

4 Comments

  1. Andrew:

    Now... to find his heel. :-)

    May 18, 2009, 2:38 am

  2. Elliot:

    Achilles was killed before the Trojan Horse ambush. But he did manage to slaughter many Trojans, including their best fighter, Hector, before Hector's brother, Paris, hit him in the heel with a divinely-guided arrow.

    I can see all kinds of ways for that analogy to go, but I'll leave it up to Warren to explain what he meant.

    May 18, 2009, 6:08 am

  3. Dr. T:

    This is a horrible but totally expected appointment. Not only will we get nationalized health care, but it will come packaged with lifestyle 'recommendations' in the form of 'sin' taxes. Great.

    I'm not worried about the CDC leaning toward lifestyle-related illnesses: it made that change years ago. The CDC became highly politicized in the early 1990s and got worse under GW Bush. Many CDC recommendations now are based on pseudoscience, political needs, drug company favoritism, or outright lies. Unfortunately, both the FDA and the CDC will become tools of the national health care politicians, and their recommendations will be tailored to what their bosses want.

    May 18, 2009, 3:24 pm

  4. Eric Hammer:

    I sort of have a morbid curiosity surrounding Obama's actions of late, insofar as I wonder just how quickly he can peel off support for himself by alienating his previous supporters. I know lots of liberals who were irked by the whole bank and automotive bailouts in particular, more that were irritated by something or another in general, and now with "sin taxes" I suspect he is going to piss off smokers, drinkers and probably people who like cheese cake. Seeing as how many liberals I knew in college disliked conservatives based on not wanting to be told what to do with their bodies, I suspect there will be some backlash here.

    I was sort of hoping that if Obama won he would manage to shatter the coalition of the left by actually attempting to legislate many of their mutually exclusive goals, but I didn't expect to see it all happen so quickly.

    May 19, 2009, 6:00 am