To Mike Nichols, wellness, well, makes him sick:

I think my initial misgivings started a few years ago when the School Board in Neenah adopted a “Wellness Policy” prohibiting kids from celebrating their birthdays by bringing sugary cupcakes and candy into the classroom and sharing them with friends.

The policy is still in force, and Neenah’s assistant district administrator, Steve Dreger, told me the other day that he thinks the children there are as happy as ever. …

The Neenah district has “no immediate plans” to take the healthy foods push to its next logical step and tell parents what they can and can’t pack in their kids’ lunches, he said — although the “Wellness Committee” has discussed it.

The “Wellness Committee” in the Menomonee Falls School District, in the meantime, has done more than that. The committee not long ago asked School Board members to make rules about which school snacks parents would be allowed to give their own kids. …

If schools are going to use taxpayer money to feed kids, the thinking goes, school officials can help make sure those kids are healthy. That seems fair enough. But then, somehow, what started out as “Wellness Policy” became “Wellness Police.”

The Chicago Tribune reported earlier this year that at least one public school there, Little Village Academy on Chicago’s west side, does not allow students to bring a lunch from home at all.

Then again, what you think you know about eating (un)healthy isn’t true, as Reason magazine’s Katherine Mangu-Ward points out:

The New York Times’ Mark Bittman — no fan of Frito-Lay — writes that the idea that junk food is cheaper than real food is “just plain wrong” and that blaming unhealthy habits on cost is incorrect. People who eat lots of unhealthy food aren’t doing so because they lack cheap, healthy options. Instead, it’s because they like junk food. Making junk food comparatively more pricey by tacking on taxes — a proposal that has been revived many times by Yale’s Kelly Brownell (and recently made into law in Denmark) — mostly means that people will pay more taxes, not eat more kale. …

Eliminating access to fast food and other junk food means taking away choices, something Americans don’t tend to like, even (or perhaps especially) when it’s for their own good.

What Nichols doesn’t bring up is what I think is the actual driving forces behind wellness’ sliding into busy-bodyness. It has everything to do with who pays for health care.

People who are employed full-time usually have employer-provided health care. Those who do not have employer-provided health care have BadgerCare as an option. The poor have Medicaid, and the elderly have Medicare. All of those programs, of course, are mostly paid for by someone else, whether it’s your employer or the government. And, to quote Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus’ definition of the Golden Rule, he who has the gold makes the rules.

There are a lot of things wrong with third-party health insurance. There would be many more things wrong with single-payer health care. The oncoming possibility that ObamaCare will be declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court will not make the problems with health insurance go away, but perhaps a Supreme rejection of ObamaCare might get lawmakers to look at improving the individual health insurance market, which is probably overdue.