Who Will Flash Mob the Public Option Like Whole Food Markets? Or How?

The Disease Management Care Blog watched the news about a pro-health reform ‘flash mob action’ that materialized on Sept 29 at the Oakland Whole Food Markets with considerable interest. Disgruntled over that company's CEO John Mackey’s August 11 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, members of the Northern California based and culturally ‘Left’ Brass Liberation Orchestra (BLO) wanted to noisily make known their disagreement. As their bullhorned leader exclaimed in the back aisle, health care is a right and Mr. Mackey is an extremist right-wing hypocrite.

The DMCB recalls reading that editorial. It wasn’t all THAT exciting. It was similar to many of the other just-say-no-to-government-involvement-in health-care opinion pieces that have been appearing almost daily in that newspaper over the last two months. Mr. Mackey, like many CEOs who want to cover health insurance for their employees, was in favor of a) promoting availability of high deductable plans as well as health savings accounts, b) allowing cross-State border health insurer competition, c) repealing benefit mandates that favor special interests, d) enacting tort reform, e) increasing cost transparency, f) reforming Medicare and (and this was a new one) g) using tax forms to enable voluntary donations to help persons without insurance.

What provoked the BLO’s ire was the legal and market basis of his arguments in a paragraph about halfway through. After a careful read of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constutition, Mr. Mackey noted he was unable to find any mention of food and shelter as ‘rights.’ He interprets this to mean that Americans decided long ago that these are really needed ‘services’ that are ‘best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges.’ He argues the same logic applies to health care.

The BLO and its action allies obviously beg to differ. What’s more, they argued that Whole Foods Market’s high nutritional-value products, like good health care, are also being priced out of reach by the same cold market-based logic.

Well done, says the DMCB. What is America without the ability of the BLOs of this world to vex the powerful and make uncomfortable the rich? It’s quite cool that this was done with a horn section and without the kind of bile we witnessed at the infamous August Town Halls. In the end, shopper-bystanders were grinning. Point made.

More importantly, if government dominated health care ever does come to pass, the DMCB is confident that the BLOs of this world will be needed more than ever. Given Medicare’s track record, for example, of denying coverage for potential lifesaving services like virtual colonoscopies, not fully paying for wheelchairs and oxygen, or driving contracting entities into bankuptcy, there little reason to believe that the public option won’t be just as capricious.

But it won’t be so easy. As anyone who has visited the Hubert H. Humphrey Building in Washington DC or CMS’ Headquarters in Baltimore knows, there are security guards posted at all the doors with metal detectors. What’s more, in Baltimore, you need to be on a preapproved list and your car will be get-out, open the hood, open the trunk and open your luggage searched. Unlike just walking in the front door at Whole Foods for a flash mob with instruments in hand, it’ll be hard to get that tuba through, let alone explaining what you’re up to to a Federal Officer.

And don’t even THINK about pulling any stunts at the Jefferson Memorial.