Whole Food's Mackey: We need to be Swiss

[Think4Yourself]

Originally Posted by middle-aged mom

Nixon was the first President with a national healthcare agenda. He got distracted.

Had the U.S. gone for it, back then, it would have had an almost clean slate.

40 years later and health care and pharm are big business with interests to protect.

No national healthcare system started out as or is perfect. Healthcare legislation evolves.
As much as I favor national healthcare, I am not sure I would have made it a top priority, given all else. On the other hand, it has to start somewhere. If not now, then when?

Wrong. Truman tried to push a national universal health care system modeled on the British NHS.

[alphamale]

Originally Posted by e_coli

Well correct me if I'm wrong, but in Germany, the government really isn't the provider, is it? They allow private providers to offer insurance and mandate that everyone has it, but the German government controls the prices and how the profits are used. Its more like regulated monopolies, similar to electric companies and so forth. I think it could work here, and parts of the Obamacare plan do that. THe real problem with Obamacare is that it's a political compromise, which is essentially half-@ss health. The deeper problem is that you have one half of the country that has really good proposals and is willing to try things out and you have another half that just keeps saying "No, no, no, and no." We can blame Obama if we want - I guess many already have and maybe many more will curse him for conceiving this by the time it's through. But the deeper problem isn't really big government; it's ineffective and dysfunctional government.

How in hell was it a "compromise"?

Only TWO republicans (out of 535 in the entire congress) voted for it?

obama is a community organizer....not a leader....which is why he's in constant campaign mode.

He, himself feared going too far.

[squarian]

Someone else notices that Mackey is an idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about:


Jeffrey Young: John Mackey Obamacare Remarks Off-Target In New Way


Hey, pal, stick to peddling organic water or whatever - and otherwise, ****.

[BMORE]

Originally Posted by squarian

John Mackey: The Future of Health Care and Free Enterprise Capitalism

More proof, after the F-bomb fiasco, that businessmen should stick to business because they know little else:



So what is the Swiss system:

• Regulated by federal law (Krankenversicherungs-gesetz 1994)
• Compulsory mandate requiring individuals to have insurance
• Guaranteed issue of gov't-defined basic plan at same cost to all regardless of age or condition
• Regulations restrict private insurers' policies and profits
• Premiums capped at 8% of individuals' income, with government subsidies for costs above this level

Sound familiar? Mackey is an idiot.

The funny thing about Whole Foods is I always believed it to be more of a left-leaning business, everything they have seems seems hippie, yuppie like if you know what I mean. I.e. $8 for a Chicken Pesto Sandwich, $3 for a bottle of lemondae, diverse employees, etc. Maybe back in Texas or wherever they're HQ'd, they have more of a conservative base but my local store in DC, the one in Silver Spring, and the one in Raleigh are pretty diverse and don't seem like a conservative store.

Plus it seems like their stores are typically found in liberal, high-income areas so I guess that's why I assumed it was a left-leaning company. Nevertheless I'm going continue to buy my $8 sandwich and $3 lemonade because its too addictive to give up.

[ellemint]

Originally Posted by HurricaneDC

I think I get what Mackey was trying to say.

Frankly I think Obamacare is a mess. It does impose more costs on businesses. That's not usually good for consumers. We should have gone the whole nine yards and pushed for universal health care, something like the German model for instance. The government basically becomes the health care provider, rather than making businesses or individuals pay directly for it (yes you would pay for it through taxes, but that's fine by me. The costs of health care are far lower in all of these other countries). The whole idea of tying health care to employment is bizarre.

How do you know it will impose more costs on business? Since it hasn't been implemented yet.

[ellemint]

Originally Posted by BMOREBOY

The funny thing about Whole Foods is I always believed it to be more of a left-leaning business, everything they have seems seems hippie, yuppie like if you know what I mean. I.e. $8 for a Chicken Pesto Sandwich, $3 for a bottle of lemondae, diverse employees, etc. Maybe back in Texas or wherever they're HQ'd, they have more of a conservative base but my local store in DC, the one in Silver Spring, and the one in Raleigh are pretty diverse and don't seem like a conservative store.

Plus it seems like their stores are typically found in liberal, high-income areas so I guess that's why I assumed it was a left-leaning company. Nevertheless I'm going continue to buy my $8 sandwich and $3 lemonade because its too addictive to give up.

Just because someone is a liberal doesn't mean they too don't want to gouge people with $8 sandwiches.

[squarian]

Originally Posted by BMOREBOY

The funny thing about Whole Foods is I always believed it to be more of a left-leaning business, everything they have seems seems hippie, yuppie like if you know what I mean....
Plus it seems like their stores are typically found in liberal, high-income areas so I guess that's why I assumed it was a left-leaning company.

Mackey and his company and its clientele reflect certain truths about our society and economy, like the generational truth that the Boomers started out with noble ideals about changing the world but eventually settled simply for getting rich and being comfortable.

Another truth Mackey and his company reflect is that "liberal" and "conservative" mean much less in the Obama-Geithner-Bernanke economy than class distinctions between a blue-state urban "bourgeois" outlook and a red-state exurban "petite-bourgeois" outlook. Shopping at WF has become one of the markers of the urban bourgeoisie, just as much as shopping at Walmart is the marker of the lower-middle class or petite bourgeois.

[squarian]

Another Mackey eruption. If he's going to keep this up, the Whole Foods board really ought to review the terms of his employment.

Whole Foods CEO calls climate change ‘perfectly natural and not necessarily bad’ | The Raw Story

[Mircea]

Originally Posted by middle-aged mom

Nixon was the first President with a national healthcare agenda. He got distracted.

Had the U.S. gone for it, back then, it would have had an almost clean slate.

40 years later and health care and pharm are big business with interests to protect.

No national healthcare system started out as or is perfect. Healthcare legislation evolves.
As much as I favor national healthcare, I am not sure I would have made it a top priority, given all else. On the other hand, it has to start somewhere. If not now, then when?

Originally Posted by Think4Yourself

Wrong. Truman tried to push a national universal health care system modeled on the British NHS.

Actually there are claims that Teddy Roosevelt proposed a system modeled after Bismarck's. I haven't actually verified that claim myself, but feel to track it down.

Tossing another hat in the ring...

Mircea

Originally Posted by ellemint

How do you know it will impose more costs on business? Since it hasn't been implemented yet.

Some of us have been graced with something called "common sense."

Others have had university degrees bestowed upon them, while others have practical experience in business.

Minimum wage worker 30 hours per week assuming 52 weeks would be....

$7.25 * 30 * 52 = $11,310 * 9.5% = $1074.45 ----which is the maximum amount the employee can pay (Obamacare limits employee costs to 9.5% of household disposable income but the IRS has ruled that employers may use gross wages for 2013 in year 2014).

You the employer must find a plan that minimally offers "minimum essential coverage" that will pay at least 60% of covered expenses.

What if the only plan you can find costs $5,000/year? Then you the employer have to pay the difference which is $3,926 per year.

And if you have to cover 28 employees?

Well, that would cost $109,928 year.

On another thread I gave a scenario of a woman who runs her own restaurant and is facing the Obamacare dilemma. I changed the names to protect the innocent (of course) but she doesn't have $110,000 sitting around.

I hate to break this to people, but margin on a restaurant is usually 1% to 6%.

In her case, she would need to turn 20 tables an hour with an average price of $40/table to pull $800/hour and have annual sales high enough to yield a profit of $110,000 --- which would no longer be a profit since she would be spending it all on health care benefits.

If she dumps employee health care and pays the $2,000 fine, she's in a much better position financially.

But that isn't the Catch-22.

The Catch-22 is that you must offer all employees the exact same policy. That means if you have one health plan for executives and managers, and then another cheaper plan for salaried employees, and then another even cheaper plan for hourly workers --- well, you can't do that anymore.

See? It's just common sense. So what does that say about you that you couldn't figure that out?

• The law restricts and phases out the annual dollar limits that all job-related plans, and individual health insurance plans issued after March 23, 2010, can put on most covered health benefits. Specifically, the law says that none of these plans can set an annual dollar limit lower than:
  • $750,000: for a plan year or policy year starting on or after September 23, 2010 but before September 23, 2011.
  • $1.25 million: for a plan year or policy year starting on or after September 23, 2011 but before September 23, 2012.
  • $2 million: for a plan year or policy year starting on or after September 23, 2012 but before January 1, 2014.

• No annual dollar limits are allowed on most covered benefits beginning January 1, 2014.

The ban on lifetime dollar limits for most covered benefits applies to every health plan — whether you buy coverage for yourself or your family, or you receive coverage through your employer.

Lifetime & Annual Limits | HealthCare.gov

I highlighted the relevant parts for those who are bereft of common sense.

Before we begin our discussion, it is important to note that health plan providers have only three means of cost control ---

1] co-pays and deductibles
2] annual limits
3] life-time limits

One person might consume $500,000 worth of health care in a single year, and a plan provider might cut that person off and refuse to pay more during the year. However, another plan provider might pay $1.2 Million for one person in a year. Still another might pay $650,000 for one person in a year before cutting them off.

As of today, the annual limit for one person is $2 Million per year.

If you spend $2 Million on one person, can you spend that $2 Million on other people?

Small local health plan provider has 1,000 policy holders covering 2,300 people and assets of $5 Million.

If they spent $350,000 on one person in a year, they would cut them off, but now they have to spend $2 Million on one person in a year -- if that's what it takes -- but what about the rest of the people covered by the health plan?

They get denied health care, or delayed health care, but you don't really care do you? I mean, after all, you're an altruist and you would gladly prefer to go untreated so that someone else could.

Health plan providers would pay out $12 Million for one person over the course of 10 years and then drop them from the health plan and refuse to cover them. Obamacare says you can't do that.

So what is the cost for one person in a year? $Infinity.

What is the cost for one person in a lifetime? $Infinity.

How much is $Infinity?

Can you give us a Dollar figure? Take your time, we'll wait....for infinity.

Did I mention health care isn't free?

Infinitely....

Mircea

Originally Posted by Colorado Rambler

Yet, somehow, Switzerland has a higher quality of life than we do, coming in at 6th place among all nations. The US comes in at 10th.

You got slammed with FACTS from the European Commission of the European Union, and since you cannot refute their claims, you're left with knee-jerk subjective claims of "Quality of Life."

Whether I'm in the US or Romania, it doesn't matter....my quality of life is superior to any Swisstard.

Your lack of win is not amusing....

Mircea