From: Tim Peck
To: customer.questions@wholefoods.com
Sent: Monday, August 17, 2009 3:47:47 PM
Subject: health care solutions
Dear Whole Foods,
I read the recent article on health care solutions by CEO John Mackey with great interest. I too believe that the government must reverse its inappropriate manipulation of the health care industry and turn to free market solutions to repair the problems that prior government intervention has created.
I believe that the government's only proper role is the protection of individual rights. Interference by the government in the health care and insurance industries violates individual rights by forcing unwilling participants to pay for a predatory collective, by pressing physicians and other independent professionals into involuntary servitude for the sake of some mysterious, shape-shifting and ultimately illusory "common good," and by dictating the terms upon which an insurer can operate. This regulatory interference causes the rising cost of health care and diminishing access to the quality and innovation that only the profit-motive can supply.
The "public option" and "single-payer" health care proposals being advanced by disinterested power-seeking central planners in Washington would mean a government bureaucracy interfering in the private relationships between doctors and their patients. It is a subversion of the individual's right to contract. It is a subversion of the right to use one's judgment to act in one's own best interest without interference. It is a subversion of the right of doctors, nurses and insurers to voluntarily offer products and services to satisfied health care consumers for their mutual benefit.
In addition to Mr. Mackey, economist George Reisman has also developed free market solutions to health care in his report analyzing the Clinton health care plan entitled "The Real Right to Medical Care Versus Socialized Medicine."
I thank Mr. Mackey for his rational contribution to the overwrought health care debate and for giving me yet another reason to patronize Whole Foods.
As philosopher Ayn Rand urged throughout her life, political and economic freedom are requirements of life. Statism serves to undermine those ends while capitalism serves to further them. Capitalism is not right because it works, it works because it is right.
TIM PECK
ASHEVILLE NC
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The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare
Craig Biddle | Objective Standard | August 17, 2009
John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, has an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal, in which he outlines several market-oriented changes that would substantially improve the quality of health care in America, multiply consumers’ options, and decrease health-care costs.
