Health Whole Foods CEO: Obamacare Is ‘Like Fascism’ 
 
 In an interview with NPR, Whole Foods CEO and self-professed libertarian John Mackey revived his previous criticism of Obamacare — but this time, with a new twist. While Mackey incorrectly denounced the landmark health reform law as “socialism” in a controversial 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed, the multimillionaire CEO has revised his assessment and now considers Obamacare — also incorrectly — to be closer to “fascism”: 
 
 “Technically speaking, it’s more like fascism. Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it, and that’s what’s happening with our healthcare programs and these reforms.” 
 
 Although fascist nations do often control their “means of production,” Mackey seems to have forgotten that they usually utilize warfare, forced mass mobilization of the public, and politically-motivated violence against their own peoples to achieve their ends. By contrast, Obamacare regulates some of the insurance industry’s shoddiest practices and imposes a small tax penalty on Americans who refuse to purchase government-subsidized private insurance. 
 
 That hasn’t stopped other conservative critics of Obamacare from making similar statements. In 2011, former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum decried that America was falling into the throes of fascism, and that the health reform law was its “final death knell.” ||||| Eating And Health 
 
 Whole Foods Founder John Mackey On Fascism And 'Conscious Capitalism' 
 
 i itoggle caption Harry Cabluck/AP Harry Cabluck/AP 
 
 UPDATE at 12:35 p.m., ET, Jan. 17: Many of you wrote in to tell us you were taken aback by Whole Foods top executive John Mackey characterizing the health law as fascism in an NPR interview, and apparently, he's feeling a little sheepish. 
 
 About three minutes into his otherwise amiable chat with CBS This Morning hosts on on Thursday, Mackey walked back his comments in response to a direct question from Norah O'Donnell: 
 
 "Well, I think that was a bad choice of words on my part ... that word has an association with of course dictatorships in the 20th century like Germany and Spain, and Italy. What I know is that we no longer have free enterprise capitalism in health care, it's not a system any longer where people are able to innovate, it's not based on voluntary exchange. The government is directing it. So we need a new word for it. I don't know what they right word is," Mackey says. 
 
 i itoggle caption Whole Foods Market/Courtesy Harvard Business Review Press Whole Foods Market/Courtesy Harvard Business Review Press 
 
 Part 1 of his interview with Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep is linked above, and you can hear him discuss the president's health care plan and his other philosophies here in Part 2, which aired Thursday. 
 
 Our Original Post: 
 
 No doubt, Whole Foods has played a key role in propelling organic foods into the mainstream. The specialty supermarket chain has more than 300 stores and plans to continue expanding. But Mackey is not the crunchy granola liberal one might conjure while perusing aisles of earnestly labeled blue corn chips and gently misted red peppers. 
 
 He's a self-styled libertarian: a vegan who sells sustainably raised meat, a man who compares the government's health care overhaul to "fascism" but wants to improve American diets. 
 
 And he thinks big businesses have an obligation to change customers' perception that big corporations are "primarily selfish and greedy." (Not that he's opposed to profits. In fact, Whole Foods posted a 49 percent boost in quarterly earnings in November.) 
 
 Mackey sat down with Inskeep to discuss his philosophy and the new book he co-authored, Conscious Capitalism. 
 
 Mackey tells Inskeep that companies must have a higher purpose than just making money. 
 
 For example, when Whole Foods decided it wanted to stop selling overfished species of cod and octopus at its seafood counters, it didn't just abruptly cut off its suppliers. Instead, the company gave its suppliers three years to come up with a better way of fishing; during that time, the seafood stayed for sale — but with a label of "unsustainable." 
 
 In the end, Whole Foods, working with the Marine Stewardship Council (we'll have much more on them later), was able to find one supplier of sustainable cod. 
 
 "You take a risk when you do that because some of your customers ... who don't care about sustainability, they're going to go shop at your competitor's store who has the fish, so you lose some business that way," Mackey says. "But it was the right thing to do." 
 
 What he doesn't think is right is President Obama's health overhaul and the new costs that coverage requirements will place on businesses. 
 
 When Inskeep asks him if he still thinks the health law is a form of socialism, as he's said before, Mackey responds: 
 
 "Technically speaking, it's more like fascism. Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn't own the means of production, but they do control it — and that's what's happening with our health care programs and these reforms." 
 
 Still, Mackey sees room to cooperate with the administration on another front: efforts to reform the American diet, a pet project of first lady Michelle Obama. 
 
 "People in America are addicted to sugar, and to fat and to salt," he says, and as a nation, it's holding us back. "Food is intensely pleasurable, and people are afraid that if they change the way they eat, they'll stop having pleasure." 
 
 Still, he acknowledges how hard it can be to stick to a health-conscious diet. Restaurant meals, he says, rarely meet his personal dietary rules — not just no meat, but also no oil or refined flour. Luckily, Mackey jokes, there's a Whole Foods to be found wherever he travels. 
 
 So our question to you, dear readers, is this: How big a role does a business leader's personal philosophy play in your decision to buy products from his or her company? Tell us in the comments section below. ||||| If Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell believes it when he says "Obamacare is collapsing under its own weight," he should not give it a lick of fresh paint but should tear it down and rebuild it. 
 
 His bill, crafted in back rooms by a handful of anonymous committee staffers, leaves in place Obamacare's basic infrastructure whiling tinkering with a few details and bailing out insurers. 
 
 The Better Care Reconciliation Act isn't a bill to reform healthcare. This is a bill to notionally repeal Obamacare while propping the insurance market up through the next election. It's an exercise in political box-checking and ass-covering. 
 
 Under the BCRA, which was first revealed to the public, including to senators, on Thursday, the healthcare system would operate roughly the same way it does under Obamacare, just with slightly looser regulations and slightly lower costs. The individual market would still be heavily regulated by Washington, with insurers limited in their ability to price plans according to risk. 
 
 The Republican bill would also preserve and expand subsidies for the insurance industry, which the GOP used to attack. A central feature of Obamacare was the premium support for middle-class people buying insurance on the individual market. The Senate bill preserves this. 
 
 "At a fundamental level," libertarian healthcare expert Peter Suderman argued aptly in Reason magazine, "the Senate plan accepts Obamacare's premises about the nature of health insurance and the individual market. It works from the assumption that the only way to make expensive health insurance cheaper is to subsidize it through the federal government." 
 
 Conservatives and libertarians believe there are other ways to make healthcare affordable. Market forces can exert downward pressure on the price of both insurance and healthcare. These forces were suppressed before 2010, and Obamacare didn't make things better. But this Senate bill doesn't do much either. 
 
 Republicans don't do anything to take away the privileges of employer-sponsored health insurance, even though that system dampens competition among insurers. And the bill doesn't empower consumers to buy insurance across state lines. 
 
 Nothing in this legislation reverses Obamacare's policy of pushing consolidation among physician practices and hospitals. The bill doesn't try to pick apart unneeded and costly regulation on the scope of practice. Nothing in the Better Care bill reduces prescription drug prices, which are kept high through government policy. 
 
 Instead of using market forces to lower prices, the GOP bill just subsidizes health insurance and health insurers. Just a few months ago, Republicans in Congress were suing former President Barack Obama for trying to funnel unappropriated money to insurers through an Obamacare program called Cost-Sharing Reductions, or CSRs. (In short, insurers waive the copays and deductibles for lower-income customers, and taxpayers cover the cost.) The Republican bill would pay back insurers for the Obama-era payments blocked by the GOP suit and would pay the CSR payments in future. This isn't repeal of Obamacare. This is codification of Obamacare. 
 
 One innovation by Republicans in this bill is a brand-new fund to subsidize insurers, a "stabilization fund" to the tune of $50 billion over the next four years. This is a straightforward bailout, intended to keep insurers from leaving the marketplace during the next three years — that is, through the next presidential election. 
 
 There's a reasonable argument for a stabilization fund that would smooth the path from Obamacare's broken exchanges to a new, workable system. But this bill doesn't head toward or build a workable system. It neither provides significant structural support to Obamacare's individual market nor tears down Obama's edifice and replaces it with something better. 
 
 If Republicans believe the bridge is collapsing, this bill suggests they're happy to let it crumble, as long as it stays standing until they can get across it.
– Thought Whole Foods founder John Mackey would be an Obama-loving liberal? Not so much. The self-described libertarian, who has compared ObamaCare to socialism in the past, now says "it's more like fascism." The quote comes from a new interview with NPR, and continues: "Socialism is where the government owns the means of production. In fascism, the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it—and that’s what’s happening with our healthcare programs and these reforms." But, writes Sy Mukherjee on ThinkProgress, Mackey has apparently forgotten that fascist nations also "usually utilize warfare, forced mass mobilization of the public, and politically motivated violence against their own peoples to achieve their ends." ObamaCare, on the other hand, "regulates some of the insurance industry’s shoddiest practices and imposes a small tax penalty on Americans who refuse to purchase government-subsidized private insurance."