Response Essay

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COMMENTARY

What You Eat Is Your Business By Radley Balko

May 23, 2004

his June, Time magazine and ABC News will host a three-day summit

on obesity. ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who last December an-

chored the prime time special “How to Get Fat Without Really Trying,”

will host. Judging by the scheduled program, the summit promises to be pep ral-

ly for media, nutrition activists, and policy makers — all agitating for a panoply

of government anti-obesity initiatives, including prohibiting junk food in school

vending machines, federal funding for new bike trails and sidewalks, more de-

manding labels on foodstuffs, restrictive food marketing to children, and prod-

ding the food industry into more “responsible” behavior. In other words, bring-

ing government between you and your waistline.

Politicians have already climbed aboard. President Bush earmarked $200 mil-

lion in his budget for anti-obesity measures. State legislatures and school boards

across the country have begun banning snacks and soda from school campuses

and vending machines. Sen. Joe Lieberman and Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown,

among others, have called for a “fat tax” on high-calorie foods. Congress is now

considering menu-labeling legislation, which would force restaurants to send

every menu item to the laboratory for nutritional testing.

This is the wrong way to fight obesity. Instead of manipulating or intervening in

the array of food options available to American consumers, our government

ought to be working to foster a sense of responsibility in and ownership of our

own health and well-being. But we’re doing just the opposite.

For decades now, America’s health care system has been migrating toward so-

cialism. Your well-being, shape, and condition have increasingly been deemed

matters of “public health,” instead of matters of personal responsibility. Our

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lawmakers just enacted a huge entitlement that requires some people to pay for

other people’s medicine. Sen. Hillary Clinton just penned a lengthy article in the

New York Times Magazine calling for yet more federal control of health care. All

of the Democrat candidates for president boasted plans to push health care fur-

ther into the public sector. More and more, states are preventing private health

insurers from charging overweight and obese clients higher premiums, which

effectively removes any financial incentive for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

We’re becoming less responsible for our own health, and more responsible for

everyone else’s. Your heart attack drives up the cost of my premiums and office

visits. And if the government is paying for my anti-cholesterol medication, what

incentive is there for me to put down the cheeseburger?

This collective ownership of private health then paves the way for even more

federal restrictions on consumer choice and civil liberties. A society where

everyone is responsible for everyone else’s well-being is a society more apt to

accept government restrictions, for example — on what McDonalds can put on

its menu, what Safeway or Kroger can put on grocery shelves, or holding food

companies responsible for the bad habits of unhealthy consumers.

A growing army of nutritionist activists and food industry foes are egging the

process on. Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest has

said, “we’ve got to move beyond `personal responsibility.’” The largest organiza-

tion of trial lawyers now encourages its members to weed jury pools of candi-

dates who show “personal responsibility bias.” The title of Jennings special from

last December — “How to Get Fat Without Really Trying” — reveals his intent,

which is to relieve viewers of responsibility for their own condition. Indeed,

Jennings ended the program with an impassioned plea for government inter-

vention to fight obesity.

The best way to alleviate the obesity “public health” crisis is to remove obesity

from the realm of public health. It doesn’t belong there anyway. It’s difficult to

think of anything more private and of less public concern than what we choose

to put into our bodies. It only becomes a public matter when we force the public

to pay for the consequences of those choices. If policymakers want to fight obe-

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sity, they’ll halt the creeping socialization of medicine, and move to return indi-

vidual Americans’ ownership of their own health and well-being back to indi-

vidual Americans.

That means freeing insurance companies to reward healthy lifestyles, and pe-

nalize poor ones. It means halting plans to further socialize medicine and health

care. Congress should also increase access to medical and health savings ac-

counts, which give consumers the option of rolling money reserved for health

care into a retirement account. These accounts introduce accountability into the

health care system, and encourage caution with one’s health care dollar. When

money we spend on health care doesn’t belong to our employer or the govern-

ment, but is money we could devote to our own retirement, we’re less likely to

run to the doctor at the first sign of a cold.

We’ll all make better choices about diet, exercise, and personal health when

someone else isn’t paying for the consequences of those choices.

Radley Balko is a policy analyst with the Cato Institute.

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