John Mackey is an astute entrepreneur who is the brains behind a successful grocery store chain with 50,000 employees and a customer base drawn not just to fresh food but to the company's core values. However, some people mistakenly extrapolated those values to include an allegiance to President Obama's health care plan even if Mr. Mackey has a better idea.
Mr. Mackey wrote an op/ed that was published in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago, and it has inspired not only a boycott and a buycott but provided us one more example of just how divided the nation has become following the last presidential election. The dividing line seems to be between those who think Americans should be self reliant and independent and those who want a large government, high taxes and bureaucrats controlling important aspects of our lives.
An entry at Mr. Mackey's blog explains that his original op/ed had the title “Health Care Reform,” but someone at the WSJ rewrote the headline to call it “Whole Foods Alternative to Obamacare.” And that, he theorizes, is what drew the animosity from Mr. Obama's supporters.
Mr. Mackey's radical proposals are really quite simple, and those who have followed the discussion have seen them elsewhere with the possible exception of #8. But here is a short and sweet version of those ideas summarized from the original article posted at his blog:
1. Make high deductible policies more assessable and improve health savings accounts;
2. Allow taxpayers to deduct health insurance premiums;
3. Allow people to buy insurance across state lines;
4. Repeal government mandates on what insurance must cover;
5. Enact tort reform;
6. Make health care costs public;
7. Fix Medicare so that it doesn't go bankrupt; and
8. Allow tax deductions for donations to help people who aren't insured.
People are boycotting the stores for this? Proposal #8 seems especially suited to the Whole Foods boycotters. Anyone genuinely concerned about the uninsured should be able to pitch in some of their own money to help the uninsured and get a tax deduction to reward their altruism. Plus it will demonstrate that it isn't always other people's money they want to spend.
My only regret is that the nearest Whole Foods Market is over 300 miles away.
Related: Bob Inglis's plan; Tom Coburn's plan; David Goldhill's plan; and Bobby Jindal's plan.
Mike teaches jousanlirm at UC Berkeley. Not exactly a growth industry. So, he's looking to build an online presence that is starting to smell like Jerry Springer. Somebody asked me if Pollan was channelling Stewie from Family Guy when writing Omnivore. It does have that breathless, shocked-naif air about its prose. Kind of a New-Yorker-endures-hoi-polloi in that priceless pig hunting scene. The vapors! The horror!Mike also never gets around to recalling that it was Mackey who narrowly missed an SEC indictment for securities violations a few years back during WF's acquisition of Wild Oats. It was widely publicized that Mackey signed himself as Rahodeb (wife's name spelled backwards) under venomous attack pieces against WO on the net. If Pollan has decided to court controversy in this way, then he'll end up as a third rate Upton Sinclair knock off. It's too bad. He had a choice.
Posted by: aisyah | May 18, 2012 at 01:06 AM