What is with the Whole Foods Nation?
By pm317 on September 4, 2009 at 7:01 PM in Current Affairs
You have heard about the boycott of the store Whole Foods Market by the Lefties. The CEO of Whole Foods Market, John Mackey wrote an Op Ed in the WSJ and dared to criticize Obama on his health care plan. He has a different view and proposes a different solution. Single Payer proponents don’t like that and therefore they are boycotting the store. Here is Greta with one of the boycott organizers (transcript).
Here is a description from Mackey’s editorial on health insurance benefits for his employees:
For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees’ Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.
Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan’s costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.
What I find amusing about this boycott is that Mackey looks like a good guy, takes good care of his employees, does not pay himself excessive salary, and seems to advance the highly relevant cause of providing healthful alternatives to the populace. Remember the Giants, and the Safeways with their monopoly before this guy showed up? My neighborhood Giants is cleaner and spiffier now with new lighting and fresher produce. Ah, good old competition to straighten you up.
So the Whole Foods Nation is boycotting Mackey. Oh, my, where will they get their organic arugula from?
Joking aside, what I want to know is what they will do to boycott Obama when they find out he will not go for public option. They should be up in arms with Obama and not with some little guy like Mackey, because Obama didn’t even dare to put a single payer plan on the table.
Bonus: Single payer v. Public option.
Hillary with her (testicular) fortitude would have fought the good fight and done what is right. We had fifteen years to gear up for this fight and Hillary would have known what to do differently. She would have taken the people along with her instead of obfuscating and bamboozling, after all she learned her lesson the hardest way. She would definitely not have made deals with the insurance industry and the big Pharma like Obama has unless they coughed up some substantial restructuring to bring down costs and increase access.
Obama did not seem serious about implementing real health care reform even during the campaign. Universal health care was Hillary’s plan, not his.
You are not getting single payer, you are not even getting public option, you may just get an illogical “trigger” for public option. Yes, people of Whole Foods Nation, a TRIGGER. It is the big enchilada on Olympia Snowe’s table now. Her idea is to give the insurance industry time to clean up their act within a certain time and if they don’t do it, then the public option gets “trigger”ed. The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benon explains why the “trigger” is a stupid idea:
We’ve talked about this before, but since this talk is becoming more serious, let’s recap. Everyone floating the “trigger” idea seems to realize that a public option would be a far more affordable way of delivering care.* A public plan would lower costs, expand access, and use competition to improve efficiency. Those are, by the way, good things.
Those who like the idea of a “trigger” argue that if we pass a reform package and private insurers can lower costs, expand access, and improve efficiency on their own, we wouldn’t need a public option. It’s better, they say, to wait for the system to get really awful before utilizing a public option to make things better.
The problem should be obvious: if proponents of such an idea realize that a public option would necessarily improve the overall system — and they must, otherwise there would be no need for the trigger to kick in when things got even worse — then why deliberately delay implementation of the part of the policy that lawmakers already realize would help?
Or, put another way, if Snowe and Emanuel know a public option is a good idea, there’s no reason to push it off to some arbitrary date in the future, as the system deteriorates in the interim.
For a guy who voted present nearly 130 times as a state senator — you know whom I am talking about, the trigger option could be a good one to save his face with his base (and from my observation, they will suck it in) and brandish his finger at the insurance industry with an ultimatum at the same time.
Kick the can down the road!
More on “Trigger” — Obama Holds Conference Call With Progressives Who Oppose “Trigger”
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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