I do find it a bit interesting how many CEOs of businesses with a lot of food handling and with large numbers of people working for them unable to afford health care and health insurance identify their businesses so we can avoid them and the potential passing along of contagious diseases

John Mackey was on Morning Joe/MSNBC this morning trying to clarify his position, again. Not doing so well. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036789/ns/msnbc_tv-morning_joe/

Medicare for all!

When everyone has it, its deficiencies will be recognized and addressed.

The Swiss allowed for profit in their system, but then eliminated it.

Mackey is a dickhead of long standing whose ultimate goal is to put every local co-op out of business: http://skydancingblog.com/2013/01/16/late-night-open-thread-biting-the-hands-that-feed-them/

Another thing that annoys me about his and other CEOs comments is the “health care should be competitive in the open market to promote innovation and creativity” meme. Come on! Medicine and medical technology should be competitive in the oepn market, but health care should be about getting and keeping as many people as possible WELL.

In an emergency room, we don’t look around at 5-6 vendors and have them bid on the services about who can take care of this patient. We decide who needs the help the most, provide that help, then move on to the next patient.

All the CEOs want to lump everything about getting sick into one big health care bucket. There’s so many more sectors to “health care”: medicine, medical technology, doctors, nurses, insurance, etc.

Mackey and Co’s thoughts are just another worn out prescription (pun intended) from their lockstep MBA philosophy.

Funny how Obamacare gets passed and NOW all of these folks are looking to Europe telling us how Europe has much better plans. I seem to remember all of them telling us how horrible the European plans were before.

Had they not been obstructionists, and actually tried to work for a GOOD plan, the US might have come up with a plan that the rest of the world could look to as one of the best ways to address the problem of healthcare.

All the different approaches being considered in America seem to miss the point. There is no reason that profit has to fit into the health care equation. Get rid of the profit-driven insurance schemes, and most of our health care problems disappear.

He comes from a rich Houston family and worships Ayn Rand. Not much room for proper critical thinking (or empathy) in his brain.

So true. The m$m was in on that game too; they wouldn’t publish any real analysis of, for instance, the British model, or even the Cuban model to see what we could do. We never saw any real cost comparisons in the m$m so people who felt that they were informed by reading the nyt or wapo or hearing any TV news had no idea of what was going on.

After reading whole food’s reluctance to identify GMOs labeling I did my “civic” duty to stop visiting their stores and started telling others about WF operation or should I say “scam”.

After receiving a lot of blowback for calling Obamacare “fascism”

According to my understanding of the supreme court ruling.
We are required to send “tax” dollars directly to a for profit company for health insurance.
How is this not fascism?

Boycott Whole Foods and support Slow Food.

Also boycott Low Information rich people.

This all may be moot as one of the provisions of the TPP that Barry is seeking ends universal healthcare in participating countries as it gives an “unfair” advantage to corporations in that country.

I keep thinking of the buffoon from Papa John’s saying he would have to lay people off, or raise the price of his horrid concoctions by .12 whole cents (a burden on consumers) for healthcare coverage, then does commercials with fellow sociopath Payton Manning about giving away 2 million pizzas for the Superbore. Comparative cost analyst anyone?

Medicare for all is the answer.

Although Mackie is confused on the issue, it is in fact true that Obamacare is fascist, not socialist. It is mainly a government-enforced subsidy of the insurance companies, combined with a reduction in the availability of health care (triage) for “cost-cutting” reasons.

Whole Foods is fascinating. There is so much liberal attention focused on retailers like Walmart, that places like Whole Foods seem to be missed.

They’re basically the same company, Walmart focusing on mass market smaller towns and less educated populations, while Whole Foods targets the more urbanized and high income crowd.

The generally correct thrust of the article aside, I had the same thought.

It’s the definition of fascism.

Absolutely. Whole Foods took over a wonderful chain in Virginia called Fresh Fields and before long the shelves were full of sugared cereals and you had to look hard to find an organic vegetable. In St. Louis they bought out Wild Oats and closed the store, presumably to kill the competition. I guess that’s Mackey’s idea of creativity and innovation – steal an idea and undermine it.

A little more about the Swiss system:

* There is (with the exception of HMO-type policies) a universal provider network. Insurance companies cannot limit competition by dividing the provider market up into exclusive or preferred provider networks, as is done in the United States.

* There are uniform provider price schedules, negotiated jointly (monopsonistically) by insurance companies (albeit on a canton-by-canton rather than national basis).

* Insurance company profit-making on the mandatory minimum insurance package is banned.

* There is no medical underwriting and only three categories of age-based premiums (children, young adults, and adults).

* Premiums are uniform within those categories, regardless of ability to pay. Government premium subsidies are available to around a third of the population. People who still have trouble paying their subsidized premiums must apply for other government or charitable relief.

* Patient out-of-pockets in Switzerland are the second highest in the developed world (after ours), and are a source of financial difficulty for a significant number of Swiss patients.

* Although there are medical loss equalization transfers among insurance companies, they are incomplete, and insurance companies still attempt to cherrypick insureds by tailoring their (for-profit) supplemental coverage packages to appeal to the young and the healthy.

* According to a Swiss healthcare-workers union president who spoke at the annual meeting of Physicians for a National Health Program in San Francisco last October, Switzerland is is likely to hold a national referendum within the next few years on whether to move from multi-payer to single-payer. (The Swiss are apparently becoming disenchanted with their private health insurance companies’ financial and business shenanigans.)

* The Swiss health-care system was, at least until very recently, the second most expensive system in the world, after ours. (According to a recent OECD report I read, oil-rich Norway may now be spending a bit more than the Swiss.) Switzerland spends around 12% of GDP, covers virtually 100% of its population, and gets some of the best health outcomes in the world. We spend around 18% of GDP, provide at least nominal coverage to around 85% of our population, and get health outcomes that rank near the bottom of the developed world. When Obamacare is fully implemented, we will be spending over 20% of GDP, covering around 91% of our population, and hopefully getting slightly better health outcomes.

As to the main issue, John Mackey may be an ignorant, half-bright, sociopathic blowhard, but when private interests use government to force citizens to buy their crappy, minimally regulated products at whatever non-negotiated prices the private interests dictate, that’s inverted fascism. So basically, Mackey got it half right…

John Mackey,
Food is supposed to be eaten not smoked, which is what you seem to be doing. The problems with American health system (calling it health care would be disgrace) is that it is operated by so called free enterprise system and, just like the WHOLE FOODS market, takes your WHOLE WALLET for some shitty and inadequate service or exchange.