Lately, President Obama has begun calling his plan to reinvent America's health care system "insurance reform." Yet the version of the plan moving through the Senate also includes restaurant menu reform (a mandate requiring the conspicuous posting of calorie counts) as well as grocery reform, transportation reform and recreation reform (money to build farmers markets, bike paths, sidewalks and jungle gyms).
These provisions are all aimed at making Americans thinner, on the theory that doing so will reduce medical spending. It won't. Even if it did, we should be wary of a political theory that says taxpayer-funded health care makes everyone's personal habits everyone else's business.
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