By Randy Brogdon

How far will Obamacare intrude into our lives? Often overlooked among the myriad of costs and manipulations included in the Washington push for socialized medicine is the seemingly idyllic goal to "Promote Public Health." However, this directive is being used to add billions of dollars in pork barrel spending, mandate changes in the workplace and even manipulate your own behavior.

Once the government is subsidizing your healthcare, President Obama apparently considers it his responsibility to make sure you make the right choices. To help you, government wants to build "healthy environments" that includes: sidewalks, biking paths and walking trails; local grocery stores with fruits and vegetables; restricted advertising for tobacco; and wellness and educational campaigns.

If all this sounds like a thinly disguised effort to insert pork-barrel spending into a bill that has been widely portrayed to the public as dealing with expanding health insurance coverage, it is. However, Congress does love to spend money and promoting health is a great new excuse.

Oklahoma businesses will be required, enticed, or some combination thereof, to provide onsite clinical services, (government defined) nutritious food in cafeterias and vending machines and exercise programs. Oklahoma schools will be required to allocate resources to provide overweight screening programs, and new nutrition requirements will be handed down from Washington D.C.

Our new Federal caretakers consider it their job to make sure us Okies eat the right foods, stay active, and stop smoking. Smoking, overeating, and the lack of exercise are bad, but most Oklahomans do not need the federal government interfering in our personal decisions.

Congress recently voted to establish a new federal bureaucracy to regulate tobacco under the FDA. The vote also handed down a $2.2 billion unfunded mandate on private business over 5 years, greatly exceeding the threshold established in the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act ($139 million per year). The CBO also notes that the bill includes several unfunded mandates that would pre-empt existing Oklahoma laws and regulations.

Welcome to the nanny state of the future, where bureaucrats and politicians reward people who eat their veggies and don't smoke by borrowing money from people who haven't even been born yet.

Bail-outs and mandates from Washington always come with strings attached.

However, we can say no as a state. We don't have to be so easily purchased by a federal government that is trying to buy us off with money it doesn't really have. Obama and Washington politicians do not know what is best for Oklahoma. We can build our state with "NO STRINGS ATTACHED."