Being thoroughly disgusted with Whole Foods’ CEO’s opinion piece regarding health care, I have decided to boycott “Whole Paycheck”. It wasn’t a particularly hard decision, since I already mostly shop locally or at Trader Joe’s.
And since health care reform in general is something I deeply care about, I joined the Facebook boycott group, and shared it on my FB page – despite the rather juvenile, foaming-at-the-mouth activist ramblings on said group.
I did get disagreement, of course, and was about to write a long reply explaining my reasoning when I realized that it was too long to make a good “status” message. So here we go.
First, just so we are clear, I’m not trying to stifle speech or imply that the CEO did anything legally wrong. I simply chose to deny him my money and encourage others to do so, since he’s using wealth built on that money to insulate himself from the reality of health care in the United States today. A large majority of his customers are progressives. His position is 180 degrees opposed to the progressive position – that’s enough for me to stop giving him money.
I did however, during my research into this, found quite a few examples that this guys moral and ethical compass could use some readjustment. (See his shenanigans on Yahoo message boards to drive down competitor pricing for a good chuckle). That just added one more reason to boycott Whole Foods.
But, let’s take a step back and look at the article, and the underlying ideas.
Overall, it’s a sales piece. His closing point: “If you just bought healthy food – and I just happen to know the store to do it – you wouldn’t need health care”. Looking at the individual points, there are some decent suggestions hidden amongst a bunch of misinformation and bad ideas.
First, let’s talk about “deregulation is good” – the gist of his suggestions. This one is so laughable that I’m surprised anybody can still bring that up with a straight face. Let’s just take a look at recent history what deregulation has gotten us…
The current economic crisis? Check! The S&L banking scandal? Check! Californias power disaster? Check! The wonderful situation with our current cable/cell phone companies? Check! And the list continues.
But yes, deregulation works – for business profits, and in the short term. As the end user, you will be screwed, inevitably. (No? OK, so how much of the bailout money did you see? And how many of you get million-dollar-bonuses after having screwed up your job to an unbelievable magnitude? That’s what I thought. But you sure get to pay off the debt we incurred in the process.)
Furthermore, it doesn’t address the issue of pre-existing condition. Insurance companies will still be able to easily weed out anybody who’s a threat to the bottom line. Only a mandate to insure every applicant guarantees fairness. Insurance is about pooling risk. If you weed out high-risk groups to increase profits, you break the idea of pooling risk, ultimately creating a class of uninsurable people, and a class of people who overpay for medical services. Wait, we already have that…
On the flip side, we need a mandate that every citizen be insured simply to avoid the “smart” people who will go uninsured until they desperately need insurance – a lop-sided mandate would encourage that behavior.
And then of course, there’s the “The Constitution contains no Right To Healtcare” strawman. Of course it doesn’t – it’s a compass, not a map. You’ll notice that it also doesn’t talk about police an fire departments, public utilities, the FDA, USDA, and a host of other regulatory agencies that help ensure we’re not living in frontier land any more. And don’t have the corresponding low life expectancy.
And that is why the government needs to be involved in health care.