Category: Healthcare

I find it fascinating to watch what happens when progressives discover what kind of a person the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, is. Because his stores sell organic and healthy products, people automatically assumed he was a progressive like themselves. However, Mackey is the worst of fanatical libertarians, though it was only with the recent Wall Street Journal OpEd he wrote that people discovered this for themselves.

In the OpEd, Mackey came out against anything but a free market healthcare system. He states, unequivocally, that in his opinion, healthcare is not a right.

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America.

Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.

I leave those in other countries to respond to what Mackey says about your countries, and focus on what he said about this country.

Mackey lists changes he believes will solve the healthcare problems, including removing items that insurance companies are mandated to provide, allowing cross-state insurance sales, as well as tort reform.

However, as articles, such as this excellent article on healthcare costs in the New Yorker detail, healthcare costs are not driven by malpractice lawsuits, or government mandated health care coverage. If anything, the only thing has kept some small control over the healthcare companies are the state laws that don’t allow them to arbitrarily cancel healthcare coverage for the sick, and those who need care—that demand a minimum of responsibility from these companies.

Healthcare in the US has become nothing more than an exercise in earning profits. Until it’s redefined to what it should be, the care of people, costs will continue to increase exponentially, until eventually only the wealthy will be able to afford truly decent health care. The free market fails when it comes to basic humanity.

According to Mackey, if you’re sick and you can’t afford healthcare, why you should just die. I don’t know about any of you, but I have no interest in giving a man like this the time of day, much less my money. I have disliked Whole Foods with a passion for many years, both because of Mackey’s attitude, and the fact that the company grossly overcharges for its goods. To Mackey, organic and healthy are green marketing, a way to make lots of money.

Now others are discovering the truth of Whole Foods and Mackey, and have started a boycotting campaign, though how well it will do, is anyone’s guess. People have to make choices if they want to live what they believe, and that includes choosing where they spend their money. I can do without the “progressive” whose beliefs are nothing more than Twitter tweets and social media bon mots, and who isn’t willing to put their buying choices behind their beliefs.

But this is an easy one for me, because I’ve been boycotting Whole Foods for years.

update Good Good OpEd piece on this discussion at the NY Times. There are a lot of folks saying, but he’s so environmentally helpful, and has led the green revolution, and so on. Well, I look at it this way: he’s been amply rewarded for this effort. From now on, any money I give the store is payment for his latest efforts, and they have been both anti-union and now anti-healthcare. Whole Foods is not the only game in town when it comes to the environment. Not anymore.

Now this is damn clever: using Google searches to trend flu outbreaks. Google is aggregating flu-related searches into trending where flu outbreaks might be occurring, or about to occur.

So far, knock on wood, the flu trend graph shows low activity for Missouri.

Susan Blumenthal provided one of the best in-depth analysis of Presidential candidates health care plans, in objective, side-by-side comparison of all the candidates: Republican and Democrat.

In explaining the charts, she wrote:

With our current sick care system, Americans cannot afford — socially, politically, economically, or otherwise — to remain on the sidelines. We have a window of opportunity to establish a real health care system with the upcoming 2008 presidential election. It is up to the presidential candidates and the American public to bring health care concerns to the forefront, and engage in meaningful dialogue about various proposals to provide quality health care to all Americans. And then it is up to us to vote.

I’m not writing with either bias or bigotry when I describe the Republican plans as being almost completely non-existent. Most of the candidates vaguely mention something about working with the health care industry to ‘make it better’. Few see the need for universal care for all. Many emphasize how people need to take care of themselves. If a Republican is elected president, it is very doubtful that we’ll see any change–either moderate or meaningful–in health care or coverage.

Of the Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton has done the poorest job of addressing this issue, and I’ve reluctantly have had to drop support for her candidacy because of this. I’ve had to also re-think some of my ideas of a general single-payer universal health care plan, as supported by Dodd and Kucinich. Both provide no effective way to implement such, other than taxing the rich more.

Barak Obama and John Edwards really have done the best job of providing a fairly detailed description of what they would do, how they would do it, and how much it would cost. I respect what both have done in this regard, and their innovative plans.

However, I believe that John Edwards has the most effective plan. His concept of a state and federal Health Market to provide coverage for those who may not have it, or for those who do and believe such is better, is an effective way to begin easing this country into a true universal health care, single-payer system. It doesn’t eliminate all of the problems, true. For instance, doctors and hospitals have to maintain staff just to be able to figure out how each health care provider does their paperwork, and understanding what is, or isn’t, covered. In addition, there will be providers who integrate profit into their business model, and all profit that goes into the concept of providing insurance rather than care is ultimately not beneficial to the American people.

Still, the people of this country will not vote to federalize any private industry, even one most hold in disdain like the Health Insurance industry. We’ve been too deeply ingrained against such. By providing a competitive system where the need for profits for shareholders is removed from the business model, such plans should end up being ‘better’ than anything provided by anyone else. Allowing employers, employees, the self-employed, virtually anyone, access to Health Markets either will force the for-profit organizations into doing better, or eventually, gradually, ease them out of business.

As for the cost, what Edwards quotes does seem reasonable. Considering that we’re spending 120 billion a year in Iraq, once we pull out of that country, we could effectively transfer those funds over to health care and see few tax increases for the middle class, or loss of services in other areas of the government. Even the wealthier won’t have to give up their third homes, or fourth cars.

Susan J. Blumenthal, M.D., Jessica B. Rubin, Michelle E. Treseler, Jefferson Lin, and David Mattos. U.S. Presidential Candidates’ Prescriptions for a Healthier Future: A Side-by-Side Comparison. Huffington Post 9 July 2007.

Sheila Lennon has been following the release of Michael Moore’s Sicko on the internet, including the defiant postings on conservative weblogs.

Hard to say where the film came from, and normally, I imagine that Moore would be happy about a wide distribution of this incredibly important film. However, there is a down side to all of this, which is most likely why the accessibility of this film online is being touted on the conservative weblogs: if the conservative (read that ‘corporate’) think tank controlled weblogs can adversely impact on the box office for this film, this undermines Moore’s ability to continue providing movies such as this. In addition, it undermines the message of the movie. Not doing well in the box office could be interpreted as people not being concerned about this issue, which could lead our current crop of weak willed elected officials to believe they can safely accept that HMO’s campaign money, as they sweep universal health care under the carpet.

I do like seeing the discussion about health care, at Metafilter and so on. It does virally add to the noise about this film. But it needs to happen in such a way that the discussion leaves the discussion boards, and the computers and hits the street, and in particular, the voting booth. That’s why this movie needs a killer opening night. If people download to watch and go to see it in the theater, cool. But the former without the latter is not going to generate the noise we really need to make.