A story early last week in the Los Angeles Times says, “If the Obama Administration's overhaul of healthcare is still intact after Thursday's Supreme Court ruling, obesity screening and referrals to an intensive, high-quality weight-loss program will become standard care for all patients. And those sessions — at least 12 and as many as 29 in the first year — also will have to be fully covered by insurance.”
Well, Obamcare is still intact, so get ready to be referred to your local Mao-inspired re-education camp where, as the LA Times explains, you’ll be subject to an intensive weight-loss program that teaches you about nutrition, motivates you to exercise at least 150 minutes a week and shows you how to track your fat and calorie intake and helps you brainstorm ways to overcome obstacles to dieting.
If this isn’t disturbing enough, consider just how the referrals are made; by simply determining a person’s BMI—a measure that has been proven to be a poor determinate of health. If you’re not familiar with how a person’s BMI is determined, here it is in a nutshell: your height is divided by your weight, squared. If the number is above 30, you’re obese. But there are multiple flaws with this simple equation.
BMI was developed nearly 200 years ago by a Belgian mathematician – NOT A PHYSICIAN – as a means to determine the level of obesity in the general population. But BMI doesn’t take into account a few factors that any normal doctor would consider in determining a patient’s overall health—like gender, age, physical activity level and muscle mass. Yes, that’s right; BMI doesn’t make a distinction between muscle and fat. That’s why most athletes (and bulked up Hollywood stars) are considered obese—because while their weight is high, their weight comes from hard muscle, not fat.
Looks like a few NFL players will be sent to fat camp!
There are people in this country who remain unmoved by Obamacare’s passage and the recent actions by the Supreme Court to uphold the law. But that will change. When people are told they need to take time away from their private lives—time with their families and friends, time away from work and from doing the pleasurable things they choose to do—in order to spend time in fat camp, it might hit home.
The apathetic will wake up when they realize Obamacare will invade every aspect of their lives—from their food choices to how they spend their free time. This will be an unprecedented invasion of everyone's personal space based on the government's faux concern and faulty science.
We are all children under Obamacare.