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Whole Foods CEO enrages left-wing foodies with health care editorial

By KC Luciano, August 14, 2009 under News

On Tuesday, an unlikely editorial was published in the Wall Street Journal. The article’s actual content is not so unusual for the Journal, but the author is. Whole Foods co-founder and CEO, John Mackey, penned an article in which, among other things, he outlines eight deficit-friendly steps toward improving health care.

Titling the piece “The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare,” Mackey begins by quoting the one and only Margaret Thatcher (swoon):

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

Widely assumed to be the grocery-shopping haven for the sanctimonious, Volvo-loving upper middle class and wealthy (heck, Barry Frank’s boyfriend gets the Congressman Whole Foods salads for lunch), Mackey smacks such shoppers at the outset with some real talk: Principally, that the federal deficit is unsustainable and will likely result in sky-high taxes, inflation or even bankruptcy. Quick to acknowledge the need for health care reform, he also calls against “a massive new health-care entitlement,” but instead for movement “toward less government control and more individual empowerment.”

In touting the first of eight recommendations

, removing obstacles to the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs), Mackey highlights the Whole Foods insurance model in which employees are encouraged to spend their health dollars wisely before insurance funds will kick in. The remaining seven proposals mainly involve some combination of legal reforms and consumer choice.

Mackey then moves on to assert his belief that there is no intrinsic right to health care, and that in more centralized countries (i.e. Britain and Canada), bureaucrats are simply empowered to make choices on individuals’ care.

Fundamentally, Mackey believes we are circumventing the real issues, or “the root causes of poor health”:

“Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.”

Clearly, the op-ed is not ground-breaking stuff, and what Mackey argues has been said plenty of times before. It has been delicious to watch the fallout from the piece, though.

Ever the living example of tolerance, some of Whole Foods’ more fanatical foodies are now embracing consumer choice in calling for a boycott. It appears that they will have to take their business elsewhere to find that organic arugala…

Good luck on that. You know you will be back soon. Those cage-free ostrich eggs are just too cool to pass up.

Topics: health care, Wall Street Journal, Whole foods