Two articles in the Washington Post yesterday caught my eye. The first one stated that per capita health care costs in the United States are expected to exceed $8,000 this year.

I’m 47 years old, and my modal annual expenditure on health care is zero dollars, which leads me to wonder what the hell the people who are running up the average are doing. Part of the answer to that question was provided by another story, about a fifteen-year-old boy who has undergone lap-band surgery.

This story begins with a little vignette about how this boy, who was five-foot-four inches and weighed 260 pounds, purchased a double lunch in the school cafeteria, and a teacher asked him “Are you sure you should have gotten doubles?” and the kid burst into tears. (What a big crybaby!) He begged his mother to pay for him to have lap-band surgery, and she did.

This story is disgusting, just disgusting. At the end it is noted that now he has had surgery, he is no longer able to chug-a-lug a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, as he used to do every day (!) His mother has absolutely ruined him as a human being. Apparently, she has spent his entire life plying him with everything he wants (not needs – she’s done a horrendous job of giving him what he needs, which is structure and discipline). She has infantilized him to the point where the minimum of self-control needed to be a functional human being seems like an impossible dream.

The story makes no mention of a father. If his father is absent from this boy’s life by choice, then I blame him too.

If this were my kid, instead of paying for his lap-band surgery, I would secretly pay the neighborhood bully to beat him up every day, and then tell the kid that I would be willing to pay for karate lessons, if he wanted them. And if he still didn’t shape up, I would disown him.

According to an article in JAMA, sixteen million Americans are considered eligible for bariatric surgery. At a minimum cost of seventeen thousand dollars for each operation, that would amount to 272 BILLION dollars. I am unable to find even an estimate of what the after-care would cost, but no doubt it would run into the hundreds of billions, as well.

Before we go any further down this road, maybe we ought to take a good hard look at where we are going. We live in a society in which cutting open a child’s abdominal cavity and re-arranging his digestive tract is considered normal, and expecting people to exercise a modicum of self-control is considered, well, crazy. What has happened to us?

I submit that the medical profession has become the modern-day substitute for organized religion. We have thrown out the whole idea of sin. Nobody dares criticize anyone else for sloth and gluttony anymore. No matter how disgusting someone’s personal dysfunction is, as long as he submits himself to the ministrations of the medical profession, the rest of us have no business being “judgemental.” Soon, weight loss surgery will become an entitlement, and the members of the surgical profession will be all the richer, and rest of us will be all the poorer.

Is resistance futile? Are we all doomed to become vassals of the Medical-Industrial Complex?