03 Feb 2008 Government Health Care Threatens Burgers and Fries?

Three Mississippi state lawmakers have introduced legislation to ban Mississippi restaurants from serving food to obese people.

We’ve written before how government bans on tobacco use in bars and resturants have reduced customer traffic in those establishments (here and here, for example). One can only imagine how few customers restaurants would have if they had to do height and weight checks on all patrons at the door.

As reported in the Junkfood Science blog, the bill’s lead author, Republican W. T. Mayhall, Jr., says one of the reasons he wrote the bill is to “call attention to the serious problem of obesity and what it is costing the Medicare system.”

I’m well aware of the way government health care systems deny people access to health care through waiting lines, cancelled operations, rationing of expensive drugs, etc. (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here for some examples), but this is perhaps the first case of it threatening access to burgers and fries.

Doggone government health care fanatics not only want to end our lives early, they want to cut out half the fun of what life we’ll have left!

But perhaps I fret needlessly. The bill bans serving food to obese people, but says nothing about serving alcohol.

Hat tip: Q and O.