Nick Cohen proves Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" correct

One of Hayek's points in "The Road to Serfdom" was that a government health care service, one financed and provided directly, would lead to a dictatorship. Nothing produces more giggles on the left than this very idea, that "free" health care would make us serfs if not slaves. 

Except, of course, it's true:

If you imagine a healthy future for Britain, or any other country that has put the hunger of millennia behind it, you see a kind of dictatorship. Not a tyranny, but a society that ruthlessly restricts free choice. It is a future that views the mass of people as base creatures jerked around by desires they cannot control. Expert authority must engineer their lives from above for their own good and the common good.

That's just the bien pensants telling the rest of us how we must live of course, not a new phenomenon, but then:

Here’s my partial sketch of how Britain would have to change to limit the costs to the NHS that stunted lives and avoidable pain will bring.

Yes, we must change our behaviour in order to suit the NHS. Which was the very point that Hayek was making. Once we have an institution, one that in modern Britain is closer to a religion than anything else in the collective belief system, then we must alter ourselves to suit the institution.

We must not eat sugar because that costs the NHS money, we must not be obese, or drink, smoke, because that costs the NHS. That all save it money is true, for shorter lives lead to less health care expense, but still, the mantra is that we cannot, must not, live our lives as we wish, suffer our deaths at our pleasure, from those pleasures even, but must change our ways to be worthy of the State institution.

It is the Grand Delusion again, that the aim and point of this government business is to change humans into fitting the system, rather than the system existing to allow us to be human in all our messy glory. New Soviet Man, that non-human that would make centrally planned socialism work, is no different in basic philosophy from NHS Man, the thin lipped and hipped prude who does nothing fun in order to die unhappy but at the convenience of the government run health care system.

Hayek really did warn us about this however much it makes lefties giggle.