Note: New info added at 9:16 central, 10:16pm eastern, 8/11/09

Well the wolf has taken off his sheep's clothing. Hippie health food store proprietor cum corporate hoo haw John Mackey, CEO of Austin-based Whole Foods, in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece published today stated that  no American has a right to healthcare, nor either food, nor shelter for that matter. I guess those basic needs are purely the domain of the rich in the mottled mind of Mackey. This would apply especially to food in light of the exhorbitant prices Mr. Mackey and company charge for the merchandise proferred at Whole Paycheck.

In the Op-Ed, Mr. Mackey offers 8 alternatives to Obama's healthcare plan, among them:

1) Tort reform "....to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These costs are passed back to us through much higher prices for health care." Someone in the Whole Floods legal department had better tell Mackey that his  home state of Texas has had tort reform in place for years and it hasn't done diddly for lowering healthcare costs, nor malpractice premiums.

2) "Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover..." Mandates? What mandates? If indeed there are mandates, considering the hell I've gone through with insurance companies as a paralegal and as a consumer, there ain't enough mandates for coverage. We need more. It sounds like Mackey is advocating either a boutique  approach to insurance or an arbitrary approach to coverage based up on the whims and profit needs of the insurers, not the medical needs of the insured. Either way, it sounds like Mackey wants people to purchase something that is utterly useless. Why buy insurance at all?

I will grant that he does have  a couple of  good  ideas:

1)"Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost..."

2) "...revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance..."

Still, Mackey sounds like just another rich guy who doesn't want to pay his fair share of taxes as he rakes in tons of dough from other rich folks who are, naturally, the only people who can afford to patronize his establishment. I will remember this Op-Ed next time I  go into Whole Foods to plunk down $20 for a  slither of watermelon and a cup of cantaloupe. Oh. Ooops. There won't be a next time.

NOTE: After doing a little more research on the subject, the great Health Plan that Mackey brags about in the WSJ piece was actually a healthcare downgrade forced down employees' throats in 2004. See "Union Buster" link below.

See Mr. Mackey's Op-Ed piece.

Other John Mackey hits through the years:

Posted anonymously at a yahoo.com Whole Foods discussion site, making detailed comments about the company's plans to buy Wild Oats, while never revealing he was CEO of the company. The SEC investigated, yet Mackey was cleared of any wrong doing. Many in the biz community suspect that Mackey was  making the public postings in order to drive down Wild Oats' stock price to make it cheaper for Whole Foods to buy.

Has developed a reputation as a Union Buster in Hippie Clothing. This includes having United  Farm Worker leafleters arrested on Whole Foods property.

Mackey told an Austin paper that Whole Foods employees were smarter than HEB (the major regional chain supermarket in central Texas) employees. This raised hues and cries of racism.

Even more: 10:12pm central time: 

I wanted to add this Union Busting Link from Mother Jones.  Thanks to Martha Nichols for mentioning it in the comments.