John Edwards on mandatory preventative medical care :

“It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care,” he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. “If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.”

…

Edwards said his mandatory health care plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care. The plan would include mental health care as well as dental and vision coverage for all Americans.

(Emphasis mine.)

I for one look forward to my required state mental exam, as every strong state should implement to detect those who need attention and possible isolation. It’s not as though that could ever be used to eliminate political undesirables:

As a matter of fact, the inmates, the patients of
this hospital [the Leningrad special psychiatric
hospital] are prisoners, people who committed such
actions which are considered as crimes from the
point of view of the authorities but which do not
exist as crimes from the point of view of the Law.
And in order to isolate them somehow, in order to
punish them somehow, these people are being
declared Insane and kept in the ward of the
psychiatric hospital…to such hospitals are sent
people who basically cannot be punished, because
there is nothing they can be punished for, and
[psychiatric] hospitals are just able to get rid
of them, and take them away from sight at the
same time.

Seriously, does this guy even think before he opens his mouth about how his words sound? It’s almost as though he has no grasp of history. Frankly I find this level of ignorance to be reprehensible in a man running for President, maybe Mr. Edwards should incorporate a basic history unit into his required government mental testing plan.