Notorious Nanny-Stater Handing Out Fast-Food Coupons

What, you expect Michael Bloomberg to be handing out free coupons to Nobu and Le Cirque? On the upside, if you're going to be ceaselessly nagged, you may as well get a free Big Mac out of the deal.

Maybe fatty foods aren't so bad after all.

While Mayor Bloomberg was banning trans fats and requiring chain restaurants to post calorie counts, his Health Department was dishing out free coupons to McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken, The Post has learned.

Since 1993, eight years before Bloomberg took office, the agency has been giving out $5 vouchers to the fast-food joints, along with round-trip MetroCards and coupons to variety stores, to encourage tuberculosis patients to return to clinics around the city for six-month treatment programs.

The agency says TB cases in the city have dropped 75 percent since patients started receiving the freebies, but a former department employee who managed TB control when the incentives began trashed the program.

"It's a big hypocrisy when they've been campaigning against people eating that stuff," the ex-employee said.

"The hypocrisy is that the city launches a campaign, as you well know, of making restaurants list calories and all that, while at the same time they themselves are proliferating free McDonald's incentive cards."

The ex-employee said he railed against it at the time because he felt "ridiculous being part of an operation handing out high-calorie gifts when my own bosses were campaigning against it."

The assistant commissioner in charge of the TB program, Chrispin Kambili, defended the vouchers' success in reducing the highly contagious disease.

"One of the things that people found attractive for them to come to the clinics was that they got food coupons," Kambili said. "When you give people enablers or incentives, you have a better follow-up index."

Consider it a carrot and mozzarella stick approach.