So you want "medical professionals" more in bed with the Fedgov than they already are?

Give a man serious power over other people, and to some extent he will start trying to force those people to live the way he wants them to. I'd do it, and so would you, and probably neither of us are normally big on telling other people what to do. Give medical hall monitors - who'd love to be able to tell other people what to do - access to a federal program with enforcement powers, and we'll see one hell of a lot of this:

Today, in the States, a pair of Harvard scholars writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association advocate stripping away the custody rights of parents of super obese children. They're for real!

"Despite the discomfort posed by state intervention, it may sometimes be necessary to protect a child," said Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and researcher at Harvard's School of Public Health. The study's co-author, David Ludwig, says taking away peoples' children "ideally will support not just the child but the whole family, with the goal of reuniting child and family as soon as possible." Ludwig, an obesity specialist at Harvard-affiliated Children's Hospital, said his eureka moment was when a 90-pound, 3-year-old girl entered his obesity clinic a number of years ago," reports Lindsey Tanner at the Associated Press.