Has Whole Foods' CEO Gone Completely Bananas? | Hacker News Reader

Has Whole Foods' CEO Gone Completely Bananas?

thebigmoney.com

16 pointscwan20 comments

From the article: With his earnest hope that we can all live to 90 by eating better and his toe-curling philosophizing about rights, Mackey manages to bracket some of the most extreme views on health care, and show both sides just how unappealing and impractical they are.

Many studies with good controls have failed to show that variations in medical care have any effect on health. On the other hand, lifestyle factors (food, exercise, smoking) have very large measurable effects. You might not like Mackey's philosophy, but his facts are solid.

See Robin Hanson's review (and cited sources) for some hard numbers:

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-medi...

The author doesn't seem to disagree (with you or Mackey) on this point, he just thinks it's impractical to expect human nature to change.

I think it's been widely accepted for a while that in first world countries we are literally killing ourselves with food, stress, cigarettes etc.

On the other hand, I thought people living longer was one of the problems facing society/medicine since even the healthiest of old people need more care than, to be blunt, the dead.

The trap I've heard described is that people are living longer thanks to "hardcore" medicine like heart bypass and other things which prolong but do not always improve the quality of life, along with greater general food security, yada yada. However, they are not living as long as they necessarily could in a theoretically perfect environment AND they are not living to greater ages with the same general level of health they could with better behavior. The last bit is what creates the actuarial and cost problems--people living longer but needing more attention and intervention throughout their life.

So, and I think you agree here, the optimum situation would be to improve general lifestyle habits and have people live older, more productive lives on average without generating excess costs relative to what we see today. If that's possible, it's a good goal. And since it can be improved incrementally in both directions (quality up, cost down) without a 100% see-saw effect, it seems like an attainable goal.

Also, I was suprised, given the source, to find this recommendation in your link, apparently one of the best ways to improve health by paradoxically spending less:

"nationalizing the industry and using agency budgets to limit spending."

That's not a proposal to improve health, it's a proposal to spend less money on medicine. A more complete quote:

I thus claim: we could cut U.S. medical spending in half without substantial net health costs. This would give us the equivalent of an 8% pay raise.

How should we cut medical spending? ...cut ... our government and corporate subsidies for medicine... give medicine far less prestige than we now do...taxing medicine, limiting it by law, or nationalizing the industry and using agency budgets to limit spending.

He then acknowledges that most of his ideas are not politically feasible.

That article is worth posting to HN. Please do so.

It seems just obvious to me that a frank discussion about the economics of health care would be a prerequisite for health-care reform.

Posted.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=775284

Can we keep liberal-orthodoxy conformance-enforcing screeds off of HN, please? Seeing the people who pride themselves on tolerance turning on one of their own for putting a toe out of line is vaguely amusing, but doesn't belong here.

I posted this link because I think it covers a breadth of issues - the most interesting of which [for me] was how much control should we put on what we say/do and how much this reflects on our companies (assuming many of us are founders / managers / leaders).

On one hand the CEO of Whole Foods believes sincerely and quite passionately in a number of issues - and while I don't think his comments are particularly radical, they're issues that are clearly important to him (and practically everyone else) while others respond with views that he should be destroyed/boycotted because of those views. Is this just a sad reflection of his customer base/the state of civil debate? [Though I confess it would be funny if some of these boycotters ended up shopping Walmart, which supports the current health bill]

doesn't belong here

I disagree. This can be a very interesting case study of what happens "for putting a toe out of line".

Don't forget, we hackers aspire to be business people too. If you think your paradigm shifting, world changing idea is only about the technology, think again. Be prepared for the reaction of other people, whether you agree with them or not.

The real shame is that Whole Foods doesn't just sell whole foods anymore. Its full of candy and junk food. Since I have to read all the packages to figure out whats healthy and what not, I might as well go to the local grocery story and buy it for half the price.

John Mackey agrees with you:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/aug/05/whole-foods-b...

It seems to me that health care for the rich only is inevitable: under the assumption that there will always be arbitrarily expensive medical treatments, it seems clear that it can't be feasible to guarantee any kind of medical treatment to anyone. The only ways to prevent rich people have access to medical treatments that poor people don't have access to would be to either make sure there are no rich people (communism?) or to make expensive treatments illegal. The first is probably not a good idea or very difficult to pull off successfully, the second seems silly. Deny some people good health care just because other people can not afford it?

So I take it for granted there will always be expensive treatments (in the extreme case, assume an illness for which no cure is known. Researching a cure might cost billions, that only a billionaire could afford).

It remains to discuss what is the basic level of health care that should be available to everyone. Judging from the article, the Whole Foods guy seems to think the basic level should be good food for everyone, others might want a little bit more. But that is just nitpicking about the details.

Given the crap the medical system feeds us these days, personally I am scared of the "you are only allowed the treatments the state has made you eligible for" route. I want to be allowed a say in the health care I receive, even if it means I'll have to try to earn more money to afford it.

Also not sure what is more unethical: paying for an expensive treatment a poor person can not afford, or consuming useless treatments at the cost of my co-insurers.

Includes great questions even as the title isn't.

Plus a shift to a plant-based diet that will enable most of us to live for 90 or even 100 years, which will mean that we won't have to worry about health care all that much anyway.

Imagine that. Instead of isolating which effect to treat, we raise the discourse to another level to examine causes. Now we have a whole different set of problems to solve.

We do the same thing in tech all the time, rendering common technologies obsolete in the blink of an eye. But with one critical difference: you have to make it easier for people.

Depending on people to make sacrifices for a paradigm shift is a recipe for failure. They'd rather just keep slugging it out in the quicksand.

Depending on people to make sacrifices for a paradigm shift is a recipe for failure.

Amen. Just ask Jimmy Carter, who was the only president in recent history to have a sane energy policy (namely, that individually and collectively the American people must use less energy and make sacrifices to do so). Not only did we not heed his words of wisdom, but out of sheer bloodymindedness we voted the Gipper in and plunged headlong into the abyss of energy profligacy. We're now paying the price.

There are other reasons the Gipper was voted in, as I remember as a voter in that year, but I agree with you that Carter's proposed energy policy would have saved the United States a lot of grief over the next three decades, and possibly have prevented the major wars we are now involved in.

Yes, but not recently. This is after all the guy who posted anonymously on his own company's board at Yahoo Finance for a couple of years. He weighed in on such weighty matters as his own hairstyle, then disappeared to honor a bet he lost to another participant.

This post seems primed for a political flame war. Can someone flag it?

I don't think the actual post contains much that is flammable, but judging by other comments here, just the context is enough to make people react as if it was.

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