here is the link to the full article,         http://meganmccardle.theatlantic.com

you have to scroll down to the post entitled "A Long Long Post about my reasons for opposing National Health Care" .  A short bio of Ms. McCardle follows the excerpt here.

here's the interesting excerpt, from Megan McCardle:

The other major reason that I am against national health care is the increasing license it gives elites to wrap their claws around every aspect of everyone's life.  Look at the uptick in stories on obesity in the context of health care reform.  Fat people are a problem!  They're killing themselves, and our budget!  We must stop them!  And what if people won't do it voluntarily?  Because let's face it, so far, they won't.    Making information, or fresh vegetables, available, hasn't worked--every intervention you can imagine on the voluntary front, and several involuntary ones, has already been tried either in supermarkets or public schools.  Americans are getting fat because they're eating fattening foods, and not exercising.  How far are we willing to go beyond calorie labelling on menus to get people to slim down?

These aren't just a way to save on health care; they're a way to extend and expand the cultural hegemony of wealthy white elites.  No, seriously.  Living a fit, active life is correlated with being healthier.  But then, as an economist recently pointed out to me, so is being religious, being married, and living in a small town; how come we don't have any programs to promote these "healthy lifestyles"?  When you listen to obesity experts, or health wonks, talk, their assertions boil down to the idea that overweight people are either too stupid to understand why they get fat, or have not yet been made sufficiently aware of society's disgust for their condition.  Yet this does not describe any of the overweight people I have ever known, including the construction workers and office clerks at Ground Zero.  All were very well aware that the burgers and fries they ate made them fat, and hitting the salad bar instead would probably help them lose weight.  They either didn't care, or felt powerless to control their hunger.  They were also very well aware that society thought they were disgusting, and many of them had internalized this message to the point of open despair.  What does another public campaign about overeating have to offer them, other than oozing condescension?

Of course, the obese aren't the only troublesome bunch.  The elderly are also wasting a lot of our hard earned money with their stupid "last six months" end-of-life care.  Eliminating this waste is almost entirely the concern of men under 45 or 50, and women under 25.  On the other hand, that describes a lot of the healthcare bureaucracy, especially in public health.

Once the government gets into the business of providing our health care, the government gets into the business of deciding whose life matters, and how much.  It gets into the business of deciding what we "really" want, where what we really want can never be a second chocolate eclair that might make us a size fourteen and raise the cost of treating us.

I realize that to most people, these are airy-fairy considerations that should be overridden by the many "practical" considerations of the awesomenes of central health care.  Well, I'm actually pretty underwhelmed by that awesomeness, for reasons I'll happily elaborate elsewhere.  But not here, because fundamentally, to me, the effect on the tax code and the relative efficiency of various sorts of bureaucracy are mostly beside the point.  The real issue is the effect on future lives, and future freedom.  And in my opinion, they way in overwhelmingly on the side of stopping further government encroachments into health care provision.

About Megan McCardle. note many similar conjunctions--The Economist, Univ of Penn, Univ of Chicago, lives in NW Washington:

About Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra dry skim milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster recovery firms at Ground Zero . . . all before the age of thirty.

While working at Ground Zero, she started Live from the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. For the past four years she has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to the Atlantic Monthly, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington DC, where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.