Paul Hsieh, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, opens:

Imagine a country where the government regularly checks the waistlines of citizens over age 40. Anyone deemed too fat would be required to undergo diet counseling. Those who fail to lose sufficient weight could face further “reeducation” and their communities subject to stiff fines. Is this some nightmarish dystopia? No, this is contemporary Japan. The Japanese government argues that it must regulate citizens’ lifestyles because it is paying their health costs. This highlights one of the greatly underappreciated dangers of “universal healthcare.” Any government that attempts to guarantee healthcare must also control its costs. The inevitable next step will be to seek to control citizens’ health and their behavior. Hence, Americans should beware that if we adopt universal healthcare, we also risk creating a “nanny state on steroids” antithetical to core American principles.

He goes on to provide quite a few anecdotal pieces of evidence from universal healthcare states, as well as some of the creeping nannyism found here between our own shores. Anecdotal evidence, of course, is not proof… But enough of it is suggestive of the old saying: “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

Among the problems of universal healthcare is a simple concept. When you rely on others to pay for what you need, you are inherently giving them a level of control over you. When you allow a monopoly organizations with guns and the power to tax to be the party upon which you rely, you ensure that you have basically no check on their level of control. In a free healthcare market, I could choose to be obese with the knowledge that my insurance premiums would go up (or that I may be uninsurable). In a socialized universal healthcare model, choice goes out the window.