President Bush has been doing his best lately to remind us why he likes to refer to himself as a “compassionate” conservative. In the process, he’s done a good job of reminding us all why the last election ended in a veritable dead heat namely that there’s not a whole lot of difference between a compassionate conservative Republican and a pragmatic, centrist Democrat.

Certainly the president has thrown his right-wing supporters an occasional bone over the last two years. They loved his choice of John Ashcroft for attorney general, and he bravely fought off the efforts of the tree-hugging, Toyota-driving environmental lobby to raise fuel efficiency standards during this year’s energy policy debate.

But what are the ditto heads to make of Bush’s surprising protectionist turn in slapping tariffs on imported steel, his apparent support of the massive new farm bill that puts the taxpayer back in the business of subsidizing the agricultural industry, or his pledge to strong-arm the insurance industry into what he calls “mental-health parity”? What has become of the bedrock Republican principles of free trade, free markets and freedom of choice?

Apparently you can’t be compassionate with being a bit of a socialist. Let’s look at the president’s plan to introduce standards for mental health coverage in the insurance industry in a little more detail and I think you’ll see what I mean.

In a recent speech, Bush said that insurance plans often put unfair limitations or financial requirements on the coverage of mental illnesses, restrictions that do not exist for the treatment of other types of illnesses. He declared that insurance companies “must treat serious mental illness like any other disease.”

A nice sentiment, but let’s be clear what Bush is really saying is that the federal government should impose its will on insurance companies and force them to cover mental illness just as they do other illnesses.

So what’s wrong with the government forcing insurance companies to do right by consumers? Well, anytime the government decides to play referee in the free market, it always seems to cost us money, and this time is no different. In this case, many congressional Republicans and other compassion-challenged individuals believe that such a move would drive up health-care premiums for everyone and force many small companies to stop offering insurance to their employees at all.

Also, we need to realize that even in this age of miracle cures and designer drugs the science of treating mental illness is an inexact one at best. For example, a recent Washington Post story related new studies are demonstrating that placebos (i.e. sugar pills) are turning out to be just as effective as many popular antidepressants.

One such study that was designed to test the effectiveness of the herbal remedy St. John’s wort in treating depression found that 24 percent of the people who took St. John’s wort were fully cured of their depression compared to a 25 percent cure rate for the much prescribed antidepressant Zoloft. But both of these treatments were outdone by the “control” group that took placebos 32 percent of those people were cured.

While studies of this kind should not be interpreted to mean that antidepressants are completely ineffective, they do serve to illustrate that the treatment of mental illness is still in its formative stages. (They might also give the medical community reason to reconsider the increasingly common practice of family doctors prescribing these expensive antidepressant drugs without benefit of counseling by a trained mental health professional, but that’s a whole other column.)

Such information could give even the most compassionate person pause to wonder whether the federal government ought to be driving up everyone’s insurance rates in order to mandate universal coverage of these unproven mental health treatments. Compassion is a wonderful character trait, but if it is not seasoned with a little clear-eyed common sense it can lead a person into doing some pretty unwise (if well-intentioned) things.

Bill Ferguson is a columnist for the Warner Robins (Ga.) Daily Sun.