John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market Inc., has an assinine op ed in the Wall Street Journal today on "ObamaCare." In case you were wondering, he's a right wing zealot. Proof below.
He starts with a Thatcher quote against "socialism," as if only socialist states have universal health care. As if we aren't the only prosperous capitalist state without it. Here are his "solutions."
Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs).
Gee thanks. I have one. Didn't notice the obstacles. What I do notice is it costs me as much a low-deductible account without a HSA did just a couple of years ago. And the HSA is all money out of my income. Great.
Equalize the tax laws so that that employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have the same tax benefits.
That's fine by me, as I'm self-employed. But it doesn't help that in the current scheme my basic insurance rate is higher than for employees of a larger corporation. And if I become unemployed my rate goes even higher.
Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines.
Which would mean that even the minimum standards of coverage that my state insurance commissioner enforces would go out the window. Sweet.
Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover.
See above.
Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
That's already been done. Did my rates go down? No. Plus, there's a lot of malpractice out there. Five percent of doctors provoke the vast majority of suits. The state medical associations, which should police their own, don't. So how else do we put brakes on malpractice? Many doctors are just as much greedy bastards without standards as some of the lawyers are. They come from the same families, and are raised with the same attitudes they share with Mr. Mackey about grabbing wealth for themselves. Not all, not even a majority of either doctors or lawyers is thie true for. But enough we need ways to stop them.
Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost.
Can we guess he doesn't mean specifying that 20% of every health care dollar goes to insurance company profits, and another 20-30% goes to their inefficient bureaucracies, and the extra staff your doctor has to hire to fight them so as to get your insurance to even pay for what it says it should cover?
Enact Medicare reform.
Okay, here let's be charitable and assume he really would like to see the massive drug and insurance company subsidies in current, Republican-created Medicate law removed. That, of course, is a core part of Obama's plan.
Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
And this donation would be handed over to ... who? He can't mean the government. Sally's Army? The insurance companies? And where on current tax forms is any difficulty presented in getting credit for donations to legitimate medical charities? This is whistling in the dark.
Then he goes on with the stock stuff about how in countries with universal health care people "wait in lines." Right. Isn't the wait while my doctor's staff fights with the insurance company to cover a routine and necessary test a case of "waiting in line"? Reportedly his Canadian and UK underlings prefer supplemental insurance when offered. That shows in his mind they don't like the free health care. All it shows is, with the opportunity to get even more essentially for "free," they'll take it. Who wouldn't?
And how, precisely, does anything Mackey suggests do anything to slow health-care inflation? Presumably this is a person smart enough to sit down with a spreadsheet and do some basic accounting projections. Or is he just an idiot who has staff for that? There's no friggin way the numbers add up without our taking some version of the road President Obama's laid out. Sure, someone with Mackey's personal wealth will never be bothered directly. Except when we boycott his overpriced, concept, lifestyle markets, and support local businesses who still identify with reality, and who still need to do the math each month to make their books work out, and continue to profit and prosper.