Absolutely Infantilizing': Dr. Keith Ablow Explains Psychological Impact of Health Care Ruling to Megyn Kelly

Last week's health care ruling will undeniably affect the lives of Americans financially and economically, but how will it impact us psychologically?

Dr. Keith Ablow, a bestselling author and one of America's leading psychiatrists, asserts that the change will be "absolutely infantilizing," and there will be incalculable ramifications because of it.

The economic impact, he asserts, "pales in comparison" to the cost to the American mindset.

He told Megyn Kelly on "America Live" that money is a metaphor, and in allowing the federal government to direct our hard-earned income to insurance companies or anywhere else, we are effectively left with an "allowance" that we can use as our parents in Washington see fit.

He explained:

"When the government begins to act as parent to its citizens as children, and says 'we are going to earmark your after-tax dollars...you must spend it on certain things,' that [literally means] that you don't know whether any of your money is really yours because today it could be health care, tomorrow it could be a hybrid vehicle that you are penalized financially for not buying.

"It takes control of your behavior in the way that a parent would of a child, and it diminishes us in terms of our autonomy and our ability to achieve things, even for liberty, on the world stage."

It makes Americans believe that they are weak, he continued, and it absolutely infantilizes the country:

"Listen, even adolescents or younger kids [dream] of the day when they're in charge of their own money.  Why?  Because we know that money has that significance, it means independence, it means that you're in charge of your destiny, kids dream of this.

"To treat the American public as though they are preadolescent slingshots them back that way psychologically, so that they say to themselves: 'my decision-making capacity isn't so good.  After all, if I don't do what they tell me, I'm going to be fined for it, and it seems that we voted this in...'"

He concluded: "What it does is it deposits us back as children when economically, more than ever, we need to be adult."

But where does that leave us?  If we really are due to become a nation of adolescents, how will we handle crises, or even day-to-day matters?

According to Ablow, we are due to see a "surge of anger" in the country if the law stays in place, but not necessarily because people want to get rid of it.

He explained to Kelly:

"You think Occupy Wall Street looked like a spectacle-- imagine tens of millions of adult-children of Barack Obama deprived of their direction, of their moneys...99 weeks of unemployment, lots of food stamps, lots of bailouts. 'We tell you how to spend your money so that the piggy bank is really ours, but you can keep it cause you're a good kid.'

"Guess what-- when the piggy bank ain't there, these are the people who are going to take to the streets with rocks.  Trust me."

Watch the fascinating segment, via Mediaite, below:

Kelly pointed out that rock-throwing and rage is exactly what happened in Greece, another entitlement society, before asking whether America is different.

Ablow responded:

"Well now you're at the crux of the matter.  We have been different, and that's why we've been the hope of liberty and the hope of the free world.  Why?  Because we're invested in the notion that people are autonomous, we're independent, we know right from wrong, we act for right."

Barack Obama, on the other hand, does not trust this "individual impulse" and believes it must be "tempered by a central authority," Ablow concluded, and that leads "to nowhere other than mediocrity and to the rise of despots."

(H/T: Mediaite)