"While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system," John Mackey writes in The Wall Street Journal. "Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction--toward less government control and more individual empowerment." This is an instance of what was said being less important than who said it. Mackey is the CEO of Whole Foods. Has he not noticed the plethora of Obama bumper stickers on the Priuses and bicycles in his supermarket parking lots? "I will never shop there again," one 45-year-old child emoted to an ABC reporter. Another 33-year-old adolescent, who claims to shop at Whole Foods several times a week, squawked: "I'm boycotting [Whole Foods] because all Americans need health care." Good politics doesn't always mean good business. File under: profile in courage.

What does tort reform have to do with individual empowerment?

Individual empowerment translates into the ability for individuals to maximize personal wealth at the expense of everything else including, efficiency, morality, competency, and the public welfare.

Death to the wealthy!

PMA: Good, yes, be honest, liberals hate liberty.

Obi Juan: The individual here is the average consumer. Tort reform reduces a major distorting effect that third parties are having on the price of the good, which is best determined by the two parties exchanging -- e.g., patient and doctor. Imagine that you could sue the grocery store for 100K$ everytime that you got home and realized that the onion you bought was bad inside. Good or bad for the ability of an individual to buy produce at a price you help determine?

Individual wealth maximization at the expense of human rights is not liberty by any reasonable definition of the word, but nice try.

Do you have a human right to 1ipitor? Get a grip. And this has nothing to do with "maximizing wealth," it has to do with preserving what liberals have left us of the ability to control our own fates and with preserving the incentives to invent. Liberal hate liberty, all their plans militate against the dynamism of a society with liberty, and yet they want to claim they have a "human right" to the fruits of the labor of this dynamism from others.

If you think you have a right for someone else to give you 1ipitor, do you also think you have a "human right" for someone to buy you dinner? You people need to learn to think before you use the word "right."

I get a laugh out of how liberals think. They project that because some segments of society are destitute; we need to chuck the system for a one size fits all ‘fix’.

Let me clue you PMA – there will always be poor; there will always be hungry; there will always be some who do not receive adequate health care; there will always be crime; and murder; and inequities of all sorts. It’s called life. And it’s imperfect and always will be.

In the Utopian world of you and your ilk, a 100% repair of all of these problems is possible. But it isn’t. Human nature being what it is (i.e. flawed).

The sad part is that we have, pretty much, the best systems in place on the planet to solve a majority of most of these problems and the leftists talk like we are living in Somalia. Obtuse would be the word.

"Individual wealth maximization at the expense of human rights is not liberty by any reasonable definition of the word, but nice try." - PMA

Socialized healthcare is a crime against humanity.