The Fight to Get Obamacare out of Our Grocery Stores

When most people think about Obamacare, they think about things like hospitals, clinics, and government lies. But the president’s signature healthcare law actually goes well beyond the boundaries of health insurance; one clause in the law requires restaurants, grocery stores, and even vending machines to post calorie counts of every piece of food they sell. Even business owners who try to stay on top of the mandate can be charged with a felony if they make a mistake on the counts.

This unwelcome nanny-state provision is being challenged in the House of Representatives. A new bill called the Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act of 2015 has been proposed by Reps. Loretta Sanchez and Cathy McMorris Rodgers; its passage would exempt grocery stores and convenience stores from the burdensome and costly regulations.

“These recently finalized menu labeling regulations are more than 400 pages long and, according to estimates, could cost American businesses more than $1 billion to comply and 500,000 hours of paperwork,” said McMorris Rodgers last November.

Except that doesn’t even really say it, because these regulations actually won’t cost businesses a dime. Those expenses will be passed right along to consumers, resulting in a situation where everyone in America will be forced to subsidize an unnecessary mandate. As if the obesity crisis (as they call it) in this country is in any way related to calorie counts. As if people are blindly gorging themselves on fettucine alfredo, mistakenly believing that it’s a health food.

We live in the age of information. If you want to know how many calories are in this meal or that one, you can find it on Google. If you don’t care enough to do the research, then don’t expect the taxpayers to subsidize your laziness. Either admit to yourself that you don’t really care or go to restaurants that post their counts as a matter of practice. Or better yet, take a couple of weeks, learn the difference between vegetables and fried chicken, and stop worrying about specific calorie counts. Losing weight actually isn’t that difficult.

Democrats are using obesity statistics the same way they use global warming: namely, to exert more federal government control over the private sector. This is going to make everything more expensive, solve nothing, and create new problems down the line. Problems that, if history is any judge, Democrats will try to solve by once again expanding the scope of the government’s power. It never ends.