By Rick Manning
Your head is tilted back, you can hear the drill whirring, and that faintly sickening smell of enamel burning is coming from your mouth, as you try to accommodate a suction tube and the mirror wielding Shaquille O’Neil sized hands of your dentist.
Well open up wider because a government-sized tooth fairy is getting ready to join the party.
That’s right, Nancy Pelosi’s award winning statement that, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” is coming back with a vengeance as analysis of the ObamaCare bill reveals that the federal government wants to know about every cavity that you have.
This cavity search can be found at Section 4102(d)(2) of the minty fresh health care law, which directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance for inclusion in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.”
“Tooth-level surveillance”?
The law goes on to define this “tooth-level surveillance” as “a clinical examination where an examiner looks at each dental surface, on each tooth in the mouth.”
To be fair, the regulations have not yet been written, so the extent of this oral intrusion is still unknown. While currently, the law appears to just expand and fund a nationwide oral health care sampling of Americans, it is easy to see how overzealous regulators could expand the reach of the law to require each American to subject themselves’ to having each tooth in their mouth examined, chronicled and reported to the Feds.
But who knows, maybe future generations will be able to look up how many cavities that Aunt Mabel had in a special Bicuspid wing of the Library of Congress, or better yet view photos of her mouth right on line at Ancestry.com. After all, future generations deserve to know whom they should blame for that problematic family overbite.
On a serious note, taxpayers will be paying for Marv Albert loving government bureaucrats to be ensconced in their cubicles pouring over millions of bite marks and dental x-rays to determine the average dental health of Americans by every income category, age and ethnic group. All this effort and cost expended to produce government reports that will helpfully be made available to the fine people in the hygiene industrial complex, so they can develop, and most importantly market, that ever important ethno-centric toothpaste, mouthwash and pre-rinse.
It used to be fashionable to demand that the government stay out of the bedroom, perhaps now in this brave new world that catch-phrase should be updated to “keep the Feds out of our heads.”
Rick Manning is the Director of Communications for Americans for Limited Government.
