Vision 2030 reveals the aspirations of our city’s central planners to oversee our health.  They want to guarantee every Provoan “access” to healthcare (see V2030 6.1), which generally means forcible redistribution-of-wealth.  They also want to use city resources to actively encourage Provoans to live healthier lives (see V2030 6.2) through improving their diet and exercise and dental care and such.  Although these are mostly noble goals, such goals are best pursued through privately-run competitive non-profit organizations rather than publicly-run monopolistic bureaucracies.  These provisions are absent from Vision 2050, presumably due to the implementation of Obamacare—but, if Obamacare didn’t exist, then our public officers would presumably still be striving to enact their own city-level version of it.  Would we truly want Curtiscare?

Allowing a commune to take charge of our health (rather than maintaining personal responsibility and accountability) can potentially be dangerous to it.  In those cases, medicine is provided NOT according to either one’s ability-to-pay or one’s ability-to-solicit-charity but according to one’s ability-to-curry-political-favor.  And politicians aren’t generally renowned for being loving angels, but are sadly more-often selfish scoundrels.  Provo hosted a few town-hall meetings in 2007 to propose implementing “Romneycare” here in Utah and, at one of those meetings, a presenter suggested that we (collectively) spend “too much” money caring for the elderly, and should perhaps just allow them to die—and, when challenged by a member of the audience who advocated against fascistic medicine in favor of the value of human life, a show-of-hands revealed that most attendees (who consisted of those few Provo-area residents who cared enough to attend) favored the presenter’s position instead.  Are these the neighbors whom we want to assume charge of our health?

(For more about Envisioning Statism, please see both Censoring Communication and Providing Recreation.)

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References:

• Provo: Provo City Vision 2030
• Provo Daily Herald: “Vision 2030 with broccoli” (2011 Oct 26)
• Facebook: testimony by David Edward Garber