Yesterday, Kevin Baker pointed to a CSM article pointing out five things that are very wrong with the Senate health care insurance reform bill.
They missed a big one.
Is the Senate health plan anti-gun?
The Senate’s 2,074-page health care bill doesn’t mention guns, but some gun owners are worried certain provisions could eventually be used to discourage or even restrict gun ownership as part of a government effort to influence behavior as it broadens its control over the health care system.
The day before the Senate passed the $848 billion health bill on a party-line vote, the Virginia-based Gun Owners of America sent out a mass alert to its 300,000 members, warning them that the legislation “will most likely dump your gun-related health data into a government database. … This includes any firearms-related information your doctor has gleaned or any determination of post traumatic stress disorder or something similar, that can preclude you from owning firearms.”
Some folks have written this off as just more of the GOA jumping up and down on the fringe.
Dave Kopel doesn’t seem to think so
“There is a broader issue here,” said Dave Kopel, research director of the Independence Institute of Colorado, a libertarian think tank. “The more you socialize costs, the more you empower the argument that the government has the authority to control private behavior.”
Kopel pointed to the Japanese health care system, where employee waistlines are measured and those who are overweight are put into special weight loss programs, as an example of where the U.S. health care system could be headed.
And gun control could become part of it, Kopel said.
“If [the Department of Health and Human Services] can write regulations for lower premiums for healthy habits in general,” Kopel said. “Then I don’t see anything in the bill that stops HHS from saying people get higher premiums for unhealthy habits such as owning a gun or a handgun.”
He writes more over at Volokh (the link isn’t working for me right now, but keep trying, it is worth a read).
Yes, it’s an opening for anti-gunners, but reading through the comments over at Kopel’s, the consensus seemed to be that if gun possession in the home were singled out as a reducible hazard, then all the “extreme sports” and any personal activity with a statistical risk would have to be as well, or else there wouldn’t be Equal Protection.
I’m not as worried about this little chink in the armor as I am about an international treaty and declaration which Obama intends to sign and then push the Senate to approve. It’s a treaty which agrees with the “world position” against the unrestricted private ownership of firearms. The result of that treaty being agreed to here would be the mandatory consideration of Federal legislation to enable it in this country, and THAT would set up the Mother of all battles for not only the 2A, but the entire Constitution as well.