Writing on RIFuture, last week, Rep. Patrick Kennedy presented a frightening intention with an ease suggestive of an ignorance about its implications:

I am also proud to have successfully worked on an amendment with my colleagues to ensure that screening for mental health and substance-use disorders are covered as a preventive service under this bill. Addiction, just like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, is a preventable and treatable chronic disease. Utilizing screening as a preventive, pro-active tool of medicine to detect mental illness and drug and alcohol use helps identify at-risk populations so we can intervene early and thereby significantly reduce the incidence of these diseases among Americans. Screening is an effective way to alleviate needless suffering while saving health care dollars.

I called Kennedy’s Washington office on Friday to get the specific language of which the Congressman is so proud but have not heard back, and on my last check, amendments to the healthcare bill were not available online. It’s still possible, though, to marvel at danger of the general concept. What could it possibly mean to screen for “mental illness” in order to “reduce the incidence” and save “health care dollars”? It sounds to me as if people who might be prone to, say, depression would be screened and then, assuming government control of healthcare and its costs, pressured to take the appropriate medication. At the very least, they would be monitored. Now expand the possible mental illnesses; would people prone to aggression be drugged or watched?
Readers who think the periodic debate over the diagnostic standards of the psychiatric profession are ridiculously politicized already should shake in their manacles over the industry’s power should the Democrats’ preferred future come to pass.