“The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.

But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

Betsey McCaughey at Bloomberg.com

Sunny Maravillosa has a  commentary on this that sums up my own feeling: why do we have to give up control of our bodies and health to the allopathic cartel and the healthocrats (thanks for those neat labels, Sunni)?

 Ivan Ilich the Austrian philosopher and priest made a similar point in Medical Nemesis (also known as Limits to Medicine), first published in 1975. llich argued that the medicalization of even normal processes in life had led to a vast amount of  iatrogenic (doctor/drug/hospital induced) sickness in modern industrial societies. His criticism of medicine was part of his more extensive attack against the way society institutionalizes activities that people can better do for themselves.

He also attacked formal education and called for networks of peer learning. Today, that sounds uncannily like the world-wide web…