High-Income Hippies Crunch Whole Foods Health Insurance
I needed a good chuckle this morning, and this article on the fallout from Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey's views on health care reform in The Washington Post delivered just fine. The high-income hippies that shop at Whole Foods are having conniptions after learning that the "highest quality natural and organic products" they have been consuming are laced with libertarianism. At issue is this op-ed Mackey wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal about the way health insurance is provided to employees of Whole Foods and his suggestions for how national health reform should proceed. If you work at Whole Foods, here is how you get health insurance:
Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees’ Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.
Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time. Our team members therefore spend their own health-care dollars until the annual deductible is covered (about $2,500) and the insurance plan kicks in. This creates incentives to spend the first $2,500 more carefully. Our plan’s costs are much lower than typical health insurance, while providing a very high degree of worker satisfaction.
If the high-income hippies quoted in the Post article took a step back, they would see that full coverage for at most $700 out of pocket expenses a year is a pretty generous benefit plan and the combination of a high-deductible plan and an HSA is an economical way to provide it. Employees are taken care of, just as self-styled progressives shopping there would expect from the company's carefully cultivated brand. What's got them enraged is Mackey's statement about whether health care is an intrinsic right:
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.
Call me crazy, but that's basically the way I see things, too. It's enough to make high-income hippies cough up their crudites. Having a libertarian running Whole Foods is almost as delicious as it was having The New York Times charge for its columnists.
Consider the following
Consider the following argument: "A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to commerce. That’s because there isn’t any. This “right” has never existed in America."
While I clearly don't buy this argument, it is just as legitimate as the argument presented by Mr. Mackey regarding the right to health care. The (conditional) right to commerce is part of America's history, as is the (conditional) right to health care in the form of emergency room treatments, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Even if one accepts Mr. Mackey's argument that this legal right does not currently exist, this assertion has zero bearing on whether or not it should exist in the future. This is the classic classic is/ought fallacy.
Fallacies of "rights".
"...that this legal right does not currently exist, this assertion has zero bearing on whether or not it should exist in the future. This is the classic is/ought fallacy."
The relevant classic fallacy is the belief that creating a "legal right" to any product, service or physical endowment -- such as food, clothing, housing, medical care, expensive jewelry, a scenic view from one's porch, a beautiful spouse, whatever -- does anything to provide it.
Monty Python covered this in Life of Brian:
~~~
Stan: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.
Reg: But you can't have babies. Where's the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?
Stan: Don't you oppress me.
Judith: Here! I've got an idea. Suppose we agree that Stan can't actually have babies, not having a womb -- which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans' -- but that he can have the "right" to have babies.
Reg: What's the *point*?
Francis: What?
Reg: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can't have babies?
Francis: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression.
Reg: It's symbolic of his struggle against reality.
~~~~
The classic fallacy is: since creating "legal rights" to free speech, freedom of association, freedom from discrimination, works then, hey, creating a "legal right" to food, clothing, housing, a new car every year that gets 30 miles to the gallon for every family, will work too. Let's pass a law!
But the "legal right" to free speech, freedom of association, etc, relates to behavior of individuals and the governemnt (e.g.: police), not to production of goods and services.
Food, clothing, housing, medical care, cars, jewelry, porches with views and all such things have to be created and allocated economically.
Creating a "legal right" to them does zilch, nothing, to create and provide them, at best.
And by the track record of governments that have created "legal rights" to basics such as food, housing, etc, doing so can make their provision a whole lot worse by injecting politics all the way through the system, and setting politically driven prices to favor consumers that drive producers out of the market. (See the failed socialist regimes, Chavez today, etc.)
Here in NYC, when the politicians created a "legal right" to below-market-price housing through rent control, half the rental housing in the Bronx was abandonded and most of the rest converted to co-ops.
OTOH, if there is a system for creating and allocating something economically, there's not going to be any political demand to create a "right" to it. (Other than around the margins, Sec. 8 housing vouchers and so on.)
Mackey's exactly right, health care is a service. Since it is a service, if you want to improve it's provision you have to think of doing it as a service.
Declaring a "legal right" to an economic service may be a "symbolic protest" of some sort, but does nothing to provide it ... at best.
Rights don't require others to provide them
The only rights in the Constitution relate to the freedom from others doing something TO you--no one can keep you from speaking, no one can make you associate with anyone you don't care to associate with, no one can prevent you from practicing your own religion. There is no right to have anyone else do something FOR you, like provide you with food, shelter or healthcare. If there was, the providers of those goods or services would themselves have no rights.