Barack Obama Hates Fat People

Even if you've followed closely the government's plan to move the country's health care system from paper to electronic medical records, you may have missed a heretofore hidden provision that will allow pointy-headed bureaucrats to track the Body Mass Index of God-fearing, corn-dog loving citizens and, when necessary, ration the health care of individuals determined by the government to be (and I use the technical language here) lard buckets.

That's the message promulgated last month by Ann Marie Buerkle, a Republican candidate seeking to represent New York's 25th congressional district, which includes Syracuse and suburbs of Rochester.

In a letter mailed by her campaign last month to "friends" whose votes she covets, Buerkle demonized electronic medical records as only an accomplished demagogue could:

The Obama Health and Human Services Department is planning to compile a federal health record on all U.S. citizens by 2014, and will include information on each individual's Body Mass Index in the files. ... As the financial burden and unbearable strain of Obamacare has started to take its toll on health care costs, such information like BMI can eventually be used to help government bureaucrats to ration health care.

Really?

No, not at all, says a leading advocate for securing the privacy and security of health data.

"The records would be held by physicians and providers - there is no such 'federal health record' on all Americans being compiled by the government," said Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, speaking to PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize-winning service of the St. Petersburg Times newspaper. PolitiFact exists to "fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups."

Last year, PolitiFact debunked a similar assertion by the Senior Citizens League, which claims 1.2 million members. The group distributed a letter warning that the administration's health reform proposal would result in rationed health care, "a massive national government computer network [and a] complete lack of privacy or confidentiality that comes when millions of people can see your records."

The Times notes that digitization of medical records "has long been a goal across the ideological spectrum," one that President George W. Bush endorsed by executive order.

Getting there will be hard enough without the added drag of politically expedient disinformation campaigns, but in an election season no policy, plan or proposal is safe from the swipes of political hacks. Given that 63 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, it's clear that the chub vote was too tempting a soft target to ignore.

It would be easy to chalk up Buerkle's inaccuracies to ignorance if not for her own campaign website, which describes her as "a nurse and an accomplished attorney working in health care . . . who is dedicated to improving the quality and affordability of our local health care system while expanding its patient-centered focus."

Fat chance.