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Whole Foods Against Health Care Reform
Submitted by Mitch on Wed, 08/12/2009 - 8:26am.
The typical Whole Foods customer tends to be educated, liberal and urbane and I would venture to guess supportive of President Obama and his attempt to reform healthcare so the richest country on earth no longer has a healthcare system ranked 37 in terms of coverage and efficiency.It is cruel that we are the only industrialized country on earth that does not mandate universal healthcare covergae for our citizens.
Whole Foods advertises their values as including:
Caring about our communities & our environment
Whole Foods does not care about the members of its communities who need true healthcare reform. It comes as a shock that John Mackey, Co-Founder and CEO of Whole Foods has an OpEd in todays Wall Street Journal titled: The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000142405297020425140457434217007286507...
He offers talking points straight out of the GOP and Health Insurance lobby play book such as:
the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment.
He in essence recommends high deductible policies i.e. $2,500-5,000 with HSA's. He also advocates the end of consumers having the rights to file lawsuits.
He also states that state laws should be curtailed that mandate the type of coverage Insurance Companies should be required to offer. Pray tell what mandates is he referring to? Cancer treatments, mammograms?
Whole Foods is known to be anti union. Their Founder has now thrown down the gauntlet and shown them to be anti progressive and frankly a threat to millions who do not have health insurance and those who could barely afford it.
It’s up to you to decide whether to frequent this store but remember, their superficial catering to liberal sensibilities in enriching those opposed to all you hold sacred.
Up to you if you want to be taken for a sucker.
Feel free to contact them:
U.S. National Offices
World Headquarters
Whole Foods Market, Inc.
550 Bowie Street
Austin, TX 78703-4644
512.477.4455
512.477.5566 voicemail
512.482.7000 fax
Thanks. We have written
Thanks. We have written about this before. Considering this op-ed and how their PR department responded on YPP, we can also conclude that they are liars. Here is what they said:
Gee, a duplicitous libertarian! Go figure!
I still recall with glee the New York Times article exposing Mackey's stupid blogging about himself on Yahoo Finance under the pseudonym Rahodeb, including the priceless
as well as idiotic crap about his competitors and what a visionary John Mackey is.
I like the staff at South Street WF, and I get brown rice, soy milk and soap there, but I buy all my fresh food at Reading Terminal, 9th Street & the Asian Market and packaged stuff elsewhere.
Before we all get feeling virtuous though, does anyone know the labor situation @ Trader Joe's?
Non union. The UFCW 1776
Non union. The UFCW 1776 has a list on their site of unionized stores- which includes all the big Philly grocery stores- Super Fresh, Acme, Fresh Grocer, etc.
My understanding on Trader Joe's
from various articles, is that workers are NOT unionized, supposedly their average wage is just higher than the average union wage, and part time employees qualify for insurance when they work at least 20 hours/week.
I don't know the terms of the insurance, though. The terms of the Whole Foods insurance described in Mackey's piece (which Whole Foods touts to no end when rationalizing why they don't need to be unionized) are totally shocking: $2500 deductible only partly defrayed by some health saving account-type dollars.
Though I guess there's a neat
perverse logic in "creating incentives to spend carefully" by making the deductible amount cost more than people have money to spend...
Great. Guilt from my recycled paper products.
And walnuts, jarred salsa, frozen spinach, whole wheat pasta et al.
Apollo Alliance needs to open a discount gourmet green supermarket.
Or Worldchanging. Or Al Gore.
Is it too much to ask to get all progressive worlds under one roof w/o price-gouging?
Ugh, that WSJ editorial is so smug & stomach-churning,
blaming sick people for being sick, as though preventive care exists for the uninsured or even the under-insured.
What an asshole!
Makes it hard to even buy soap at his store!
Yeah but when people manage to save all the money in their HSAs
because they can't afford the deductibles and therefore forgo most actual medical spending, they are then free to spend it how they see fit, like say on expensive herbal supplements at Whole Foods.
no, it reverts to the employer
unspent HSA funds are "use it or lose it"- they revert to the employer, which is why employer's like them (and it's cheaper than providing a lower deductible plan).
or was that a joke about how you can use them on vitamins? yeah, you can blow them on certain OTC health stuff.
This is wrong.
The whole point of HSAs is that they are portable. In general, HRAs and FSAs are not portable.
Au contraire: the whole point of HSAs
is to change the subject from real health care reform or the way health care works better and costs less in places like France.
That's the only kind of change that people who just hate hate hate the idea that their tax dollars might in some way subsidize their fellow Americans' welfare are willing to make -- even if it means accepting overpriced and under-performing health care for themselves.
Prescription: stop hating your fellow Americans.
Not endorsing social programs does not equal hating Americans
I don't think that Americans hate the prospect of helping each other out. It seems as though they hate the idea of having to be taxed for systems that are ineffective, are abused, are not viable over the long-term, or just the idea of being told what to do. There are many people who hate paying taxes are both generous and charitable. You have to play to their values, not their legal governance or their pocketbooks.
I hate being taxed to pay for
ill-planned wars of choice, but no one asked me about that.
Hey, me too!
I totally agree. And if we in fact went to Iraq for oil, let's be honest with ourselves and at least get the oil flowing already!
Love this quote
I think that's a lot of progressive's exact problem with people who fret that a strong public option might eat into private insurance company profits. Private insurance coverage as it is implemented in the United States is ineffective, abused and not viable over the long term. You could not have synopsized the current system more perfectly.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
I love this quote
"UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It's the Post Office that's always having problems."
- President Obama
While I would argue that USPS is better than UPS but worse than FedEx and the quote taken out of context is probably more powerful than not, it is certainly not reassuring.
Not responding to substance
Instead you keep just throwing up clichés
I don't think government does everything better but the factual evidence shows the way the overall system is run now that government does a better job of it in the section of healthcare it does run in terms of controlling costs. And both sides cold be forced to run better in terms of cost if a base line for competition is that everyone is covered. Plus we are really talking about a system that maximizes competition and maximizes choice. Currently in most areas of the country a very, very few insurers are significant players, in a lot of areas (like Philly) a single insurance company so dominates the market that its a virtual monopoly.
Don't you believe in competition, Nick?
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Sure it does, Nick unless you have a better social program
You either want your fellow citizens covered or you don't.
We could institute the French system tomorrow, #1 ranked by the World Health Organization, costs less than the US system, does more, includes a great big public plan that basically is Medicare for everyone.
You in, Nick?
Or does covering everyone not play to your (ha ha) values?
Neil Bluhm too is anti-union
Speaking of anti-union, Neil Bluhm, billionaire contributor to Obama and owner of the proposed SugarHouse casino, is opposed to the Employee Free Choice Act.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=a6A3G.MZZqIw
Not as crazy as it seems
This is about as ironic as the fact that Jon Corzine was an executive at Goldman Sachs and the two of the richest men in America (Warren Buffet and Bill Gates) are liberal.
Soros too
George Soros also comes to mind for this list.
Time to switch to Essene
I had kind of shifted over to Whole Foods but their arguments in that piece were such an obvious grab for more business for the insurance industry I can't face it. I should have been going to Essene for a while now, it's just further away. But screw it... I will. It's just too disgusting to think of getting into this with Whole Foods taking up this fight.
I honestly don't even get it... it's one thing for the insurance industry to oppose reform but for a place like Whole Foods? They stand to gain a lot by the public option driving prices down.
Ford has been backing large scale reform for years. I think Ford even said it was down with single payer.
---
This Too Will Pass, for the guts in your cerebrum.
It is remarkable
that the CEO of Whole Foods would go so out of his way to publicly alienate himself from so much of the target demographic of his customer base. Its not a stretch to suppose a lot of people concerned about consuming organic foods also support health care reform.
It sort of reminds me of some of those unfortunate comments from Tommy Hilfinger back in the day that Spike Lee parodied in the movie Bamboozled. Warning the parody ad makes use of a pun on an offensive term and Hilfinger's name.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.