Two difficult court cases protect the public's health

Two interesting court cases relevant to medical reality came up recently. 1)Yahoo news is reporting that a judge has thrown out a case where lawyers wanted to use religious and alt-med exemptions as an excuse to not get health care. People were claiming that they had faith that God would heal them in times of sickness, and that forcing them to get health care was an attack on that belief. There are a lot of things wrong with this -- for example, they weren't being forced to actually get health care, just insurance -- and to be frank, this sort of thinking constitutes a major health risk to the population. It also smells very much like a fishing expedition on the part of people against universal health care, using religion as a "get out of critical responses free" card. I've said this before: as an American I am not thrilled ...