There are also potential consequences to "prevention" policy.

For instance, you can "persuade" people to care by coercing them. Increasingly, elected officials are warming to the idea.

We've seen an explosion of intrusive legislation around the nation -- sin taxes and ingredient bans, to name two. The more we collectivize health care policy the more your comrades will make it their business to demand preventive health calisthenics.

In a recent, amazingly uncritical article about preventive care in Time magazine, titled "This Doctor Does Not Want To See You" -- because, as we all know, most doctors yearn for pervasive sickness -- we read this pronouncement: "Ours is a system that rewards pills and procedures and nurtures a clinical culture in which the goal is primarily to fix what goes wrong."

You've got that right. Millions of Americans are now alive, living without excruciating pain, engaging in healthy sex lives, avoiding suicide, etc., because of pills and the clinical culture that many preventive care proponents like to denigrate.

It's one thing to blow off steam about corporate America, insurance companies and overpriced drugs but quite another to undervalue technology. The idea that jumping jacks can take the place of pharmaceuticals is a dangerous one.

Moreover, diverting dollars from the "clinical culture" into programs that try to persuade me to get more colonoscopies would be a serious waste of time.

Very much like the entire institutionalized "preventive care" racket.