Thanks in large part to Obamacare our healthcare system is beginning to look a lot like our government-run schooling system, where instead of school teachers and administrators acting in loco parentis, they’re increasingly trying to take the place of parents—because after all, in the Nanny State parents can’t be trusted to raise their children properly.

This usurpation takes many forms from micromanaging what students are allowed to eat to “health” classes that push politicized views of sex, marriage, and family. Unfortunately, doctors are following suit, and rather than acting like medical professionals with an important but defined role,The Federalist’s Vik Khanna reports that because of “medicalization” doctors are behaving more like “our societal hall monitor”:

Adam Goldstein, M.D., of North Carolina exemplifies the problem. His facile positioning of firearms as the new tobacco, coating the argument in a patina of medical benevolence, is testament to the profession’s creativity in dragging into its sphere things that do not belong there. There is, of course, no Constitutional right to smoke. But Dr. Goldstein doesn’t stop there. He wants national standards of licensure and professional behavior, especially regarding physicians and guns, akin to what is seen with commercial truckers. He also supports legal designation of all healthcare settings as “gun-free” zones, without a trace of irony about the fact that schools already occupy that space.

Obamacare makes this situation worse, as Khanna continues:

As I have written elsewhere, the Affordable Care Act’s statutory language against gathering information about gun ownership is a subterfuge. The feds clearly want to doctors to inquire about and document in medical records information about gun ownership. …

As physicians increasingly become employees, we can expect them to behave as such; they will ask about what their employers and their employers’ overseers want to them ask about, all under the guise of quality healthcare and helping to save us from ourselves. …

The debate we need to have is this one: is it possible for a free society to try to prevent every potential tragic or adverse event? At what cost in commerce, individual freedom, professional autonomy, and respect for government? …

Within the next decade, a very large number of Americans will join gun owners in the view that the healthcare industry, now explicitly an agent of the federal government, simply cannot be trusted with any information beyond what is necessary to solve an immediate clinical problem.