Back in August, I got thoroughly shook when I heard a conversation between Dr. Oz and Ben Shapiro, on the Ben Shapiro show. I have saved my reaction for October, a month when I post about scary things, because Dr. Oz does not seem to realize how scary his plans are.

They are discussing the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again-) government initiative. Ben asks about the problem that patients have difficulty getting ahold of their medical records (their “charts”), which makes it difficult to get your information from one specialist to another.

Dr. Oz’s solution, though he doesn’t articulate it in this short, is that each patient chart will exist in a big government database. It will be tied to your social security number, and to “facial recognition, like in airports.” There will also be a big database of MAHA-approved healthcare providers, so these people can have instant access to your patient records. The MAHA bot can recommend to you an approved provider in your area, and, as Dr. Oz forecasts in this short, the MAHA bot can also call your attention to incipient health problems that you may have, and recommend, say, an app to help you lower your blood sugar. And it can tell you not to eat that thing that you’re about to eat. All this, said Dr. Oz on The Ben Shapiro Show, will be “completely optional.”

What could possibly go wrong?

I believe that Dr. Oz has good intentions. He wants to help Americans be healthier, and direct action on this by a massive, centralized government department is the only way he can imagine to get this done.

Whenever we create an awesome new power, we have to game out all the scenarios. We have to imagine not only how it will be used by people with good intentions, but how it could be used by people with bad intentions. Because every awesome new power will fall into the bad-intentioned hands eventually.

So, what could go wrong?

First of all, how long will participation in this system remain optional? And how “optional” will it really be? Will there be any health-care providers who accept patients whose charts haven’t been uploaded into the Leviathan database? Will this system, in fact, make it more difficult to find niche specialists who can help you with your particular problem? Because I gotta say, everyone I know who has become healthier, has done it by using resources outside the official healthcare system.

What happens if an error gets encoded in the official system? We saw this last week, where the diagnostic criteria for Lyme disease were dead wrong. Anyone who wanted to get diagnosed needed to find a rogue doctor. What will we do when Dr. Oz has gotten rid of all the rogue doctors?

Even if you try to opt out, you probably have some former doctors who would willingly turn over their records about you to Leviathan, to be listed next to your face scan and social security number. So you now have a, possibly outdated or incomplete, patient chart that is going to follow you around. Perhaps this chart will include an earlier misdiagnosis, like hysterical hypochondria instead of Lyme disease. Or “drug-seeking behavior” instead of chronic pain.

And how might our bad actors use this chart that is linked to all your other citizen data? Let me count the ways. You could be denied medical care if you don’t comply with a new, untested treatment. (Nevermind. That has never happened before.) Your taxes could go up if you are pre-diabetic; after all, you are costing the taxpayer more money! Never mind that you tried to opt out of Medicaid. You could have your grocery-store purchases restricted (card turned down!) if you try to buy something that the app deems inappropriate for a person of your health status. (These are the same people, recall, who apparently taught us the wrong food pyramid for sixty years.)

And, since this is October, let’s go for the really scary, but still plausible, scenario.

You’re walking down the street in your neighborhood. A drone buzzes up to you, identifies you using face-recognition technology. A friendly little Clippy pops out and chirps,

“Hello! It looks like your blood sugar is high. You have one year to get it down, using this app, or my brother drone will find you and euthanize you in order to save money for the taxpayers.”

Happy Halloween, my friends!