Yes, I'm interested. This article was relevant to some community building efforts I'm involved with, and I'd love to read more veteran insights on the subject.
"So, if you are a Whole Foods shopper, please consider honoring the boycott, at least for a short period of time. The impact will be very evident, and almost immediate."
I have a different idea.
If you are a liberal who shops at Whole Foods, and you read John Mackey's article with his ideas about health care reform, why don't you think about whether the solutions he's proposing -- and has successfully implemented among thousands of happy, healthy Whole Foods employees -- might be worth some serious consideration.
Instead of, you know, rejecting his free market ideas out-of-hand with insulting ad hominem attacks and threats of a hard-line ideological boycott.
Tolerance, civility, honest debate, etc.
Just sayin'.
Because Whole Foods has been amazingly successful as a company in recent years. And they do have thousands of employees. And I'm fairly sure that those employees like being able to keep the majority of their health care dollars, instead of having them thrown away on overly comprehensive health insurance policies they don't want or need.
Firstly and most importantly thank you for keeping such a high standard of discourse. It's appreciated.
Secondly, many of Mackey's points are sound policy: health insurance should be universally deductable (or not) and HSAs may or may not be very effective.
However, others are disingenuous; all healthcare is rationed, in the US it's rationed by ability to pay whereas in Canada and the UK it's rationed by medical severity; food and shelter are already commonly provided by governments; the existence of faceless bureaucracies limiting care in traditional health insurance agencies and last but not least the Constitution's explicit disclaimer being treated as an exclusive list of rights to be guaranteed.
Most crucially in my view it entirely ignores the issue of insurers' ability to redefine their risk pools. What protection does Mackey's plan offer someone with a preexisting condition? Someone who develops a chronic and expensive condition? Someone who becomes unemployed? These are severely problematic use cases in the current system.
His numbers don't make a lot of sense to me. As I read it, there's a $2500 deductible and Whole Foods contributes $1800/yr to an account their employees can use to pay for care. This basically equates to a $700 deductible, no?
I agree, with one correction: you do not have to be a liberal to shop at Whole Foods and to think whether the proposed solutions are worth consideration.
This split into conservatives and liberals, while sometimes meaningful, often hurts the debate. We can take each issue on its merits without referring to talking points, party lines, etc.
The article assumes that any cancellations must be unjust, and then uses math to show that there are more cancellations than one might suspect. But if the cancellations aren't unjust in the first place, then the article is all smoke and no fire.
News flash - If you include fraudulent information on your insurance application, your insurance company may cancel your coverage when you need it most. Of course, if you filled out your application in good faith and they try to cancel it for frivolous reasons, you can sue them in court.
What exactly is the problem here?
Most of the urgency in his article comes from comparing fraudulent insurance applications to game show contestants and underage gamblers. Using these kinds of analogies obscures the more fundamental fact that insurance companies can only legally cancel your policy when you have supplied demonstrably fraudulent information.
That hardly seems like a scandal, or anything that warrants additional government regulation in what is already an incredibly heavily regulated industry.
