Whole Foods CEO Bashing Obamacare

August 14, 2009 · By

John Mackey’s Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, angers his leftist shoppers.  Via Lasso of Truth.

The money quote (kind of lengthy, but worth every penny! Emphasis mine):

Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?

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

Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.

Although Canada has a population smaller than California, 830,000 Canadians are currently waiting to be admitted to a hospital or to get treatment, according to a report last month in Investor’s Business Daily. In England, the waiting list is 1.8 million.

At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearly—they want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an “intrinsic right to health care”? The answer is clear—no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.—or in any other country.

Comments

One Response to “Whole Foods CEO Bashing Obamacare”

  1. johndoe124 on August 14th, 2009 5:04 pm [#]

    I think the only people arguing the health care is an intrinsic right are advocates of socialized health care and human rights shamans like Ignatieff. For those of us on the right who believe in individual rights and freedoms, it’s intrinsically not a right.

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