Thieves and Fools, Part II

This column is the second installment of an ongoing series, entitled : If you think your health care is my responsibility, you are a thief. If you think our health care system would be better if the government would intervene, you're a fool.

With a sympathetic-to-the-cause president and huge sympathetic majorities in Congress, we find ourselves in grave danger of getting a "universal health care" system crammed down our throats.

Rather, as The Wall Street Journal editorialized today, we risk having such a program — there's just no way around this one — shoved up our asses.

According to the Journal, Medicare bean-counters recently decided to deny funding for virtual colonoscopies. Such procedures, described as CT scans of the abdomen, can detect polyps that lead to deadly colon cancer. Better still, they can do so with far less discomfort and personal ... intrusion ... than traditional colonoscopies, in which optical equipment is inserted into the body.

But the procedures are too costly for Medicare, which faces almost $40 trillion of promised benefits in coming years. So the government, which decades ago promised medical care to millions of Americans, cannot today afford high-quality, new-era services. So instead, bureaucrats think it appropriate to relegate patients to a thorough — and quite uncomfortable, no doubt — gut-check.