opensoul.org

After hearing the responses to Whole Foods Chairman and CEO John Mackey’s Wall Street Journal article about healthcare, I assumed that the article was full of fear mongering and tired rhetoric. But when I finally got around to reading it, I was pleasantly surprised. He’s one of the few critics of the current healthcare reform discussion that emphasizes that we do indeed need reform and outlines what he thinks it should look like.

Mackey puts forth many great suggestions on how we could reduce the overhead of our healthcare system. There is very little to disagree with in his suggestions, which include offering the same tax benefits to individual plans, remove state boundaries for provider choices, tort reform to reduce the costs of lawsuits, and increased transparency.

Mackey’s premise is that we need to focus on reducing costs and reforming the policies that are preventing insurance companies from competing, while encouraging people to take responsibility for their own health. Despite using obnoxious cliches, he has legitimate concerns about how we would pay for the proposed reforms.

There are three things in his article that are fundamental to the debate. I will examine each of these in separate posts:

1. Is healthcare a right or a privilege?
2. Are most health problems self-inflicted?
3. Who gets to decide what is covered?