Whole Foods CEO Enters Health Care Debate-And Customers Call For A Boycott

“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.”

John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market wrote those words, and many others, in a Wall Street Journal  op-ed piece published August 11.  In his article, he lists several ways to actually reform health insurance and make it much more accessible for all.  As a businessman who has actual real-life experience with providing hundreds of employees with benefits, including health insurance, his ideas are spot on.  Read the op-ed for a full account, but some of his suggestions include:  easier access to HSA’s (health savings accounts), tort reform, consumers being able to cross state lines for their insurance shopping, and making insurance premiums tax deductible for individuals, as they are currently for corporations.  And boy, did he touch off a firestorm.  At the Whole Foods website forum, normally used by customers to discuss products, recipes, and such, a new category called “Health Care Reform” has over 10,000 posts as of this writing.

I perused these posts last night and this morning and of course, the libs are calling for a boycott of the store.  In their arrogance, they believe that only liberal progressive types shop at Whole Foods, ergo, a boycott will drive the company to its knees, and John Mackey will lose his job.  They were most indignant and disbelieving to hear from numerous conservatives and libertarians that they too shop at Whole Foods and will NOT be boycotting.  As a matter of fact, many of those liberty-loving posters said they would be shopping there more often as a show of support for CEO Mackey.

This didn’t set well at all with the tolerant libs.  Aghast at the thought that they might have, at one time, been in the store at the same time as the unenlightened and unwashed, maybe even standing next to one in the produce section, they struck back with furious and cutting words.

“To all you non-Whole Foods fright wingers posting here to defend CEO John Mackey’s outlandish statements, go ahead and take my place!  I shopped there for many years, spent $200 a week in doing so.  Yea, I’m a very proud liberal and at one time like Whole Foods, but not any more.  So take my place, take our places!  Go ahead and stick up for Mackey.  But just remember, they don’t sell your favorites – no cokes, no freetos, no cheetos and no armor hot dogs.  No trailor trash snack foods, and worst of all (for you), nothing fried.  Let’s see how long Whole Food makes it with your diet demands!”

One catchy thread title caught my eye:  “You think the anti-health crowd shops at Whole Foods—NOT!!” This poster went on to explain quite rationally why conservatives didn’t shop at Whole Foods:  1)we don’t know anything about eating healthy food and don’t care to learn; 2)we like white bread and cheesy chips-type stuff; 3)we don’t have enough money to afford to shop there and would be horrified at the prices.  This particular poster went on to inform us that she knew for a fact that conservatives and people who thought like that didn’t shop there; she had never seen anyone in the store who looked like a right-winger.

As for me, I do shop at Whole Foods, and have for several years.  I do not intend to boycott; I will continue to shop there. John Mackey’s very real and practical suggestions for how to make health insurance more easily available for those who currently have none mirror my own.  I find it telling that liberal pundits and internet bloggers and posters who have been critical of those who oppose Obamacare without providing a plan of their own are outraged when someone actually does.

Mackey’s ideas are different from Obama’s in that Mackey’s would actually accomplish reform of health care without enslaving the American people.   The actual provision of health care to all Americans has never been the goal of Obama and his cronies; their plan is merely a device to gain more and more control over the citizenry and further their socialist agenda.

For following the principles of capitalism, for knowing and respecting our country’s founding documents, for being a responsible businessman, and for speaking his mind to the American public, I salute John Mackey, a true patriot.

And I guess that the next time I go to Whole Foods I better wear my PALIN 2012 cap, so my fellow shoppers won’t mistake me for a tolerant-progressive-liberal-type.

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