I find the latest kerfuffle about health care to be as tedious as the climate change monkey business. It's political madness, where every rent seeker and interest group with a wacko agenda gets time on the podium to harangue society and seek converts to their own particular obsessions. Though none seem to have any sensible ideas they sometimes do an interesting job of debunking the bad ideas of other pretenders.

"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

—Margaret Thatcher

With a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other people's money. These deficits are simply not sustainable. They are either going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation, or they will bankrupt us.

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. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. . .

Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care—to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals. While all of us empathize with those who are sick, how can we say that all people have more of an intrinsic right to health care than they have to food or shelter?

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This "right" has never existed in America

Even in countries like Canada and the U.K., there is no intrinsic right to health care. Rather, citizens in these countries are told by government bureaucrats what health-care treatments they are eligible to receive and when they can receive them. All countries with socialized medicine ration health care by forcing their citizens to wait in lines to receive scarce treatments.

Although Canada has a population smaller than California, 830,000 Canadians are currently waiting to be admitted to a hospital or to get treatment, according to a report last month in Investor's Business Daily. In England, the waiting list is 1.8 million.

At Whole Foods we allow our team members to vote on what benefits they most want the company to fund. Our Canadian and British employees express their benefit preferences very clearly—they want supplemental health-care dollars that they can control and spend themselves without permission from their governments. Why would they want such additional health-care benefit dollars if they already have an "intrinsic right to health care"? The answer is clear—no such right truly exists in either Canada or the U.K.—or in any other country.

That's John Mackey of Whole Foods Market, with a little straight talk about health care. However, he has his own self serving obsessions.

Rather than increase government spending and control, we need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health.

Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.

Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age.

There is also recent evidence of the reverse, and even more compelling evidence that it all depends, varying by individual, and that the "experts" have few clues. Certainly they have been comprehensively wrong in the past and have little but correlation on selected data to support their current causal claims. That doesn't mean that there aren't oddments of solid causal data, just that the sweeping claims of Mackey are nonsensical.

We are slowly gaining better understanding and moving away from sweeping claims to individual nutritional requirements. We are also slowly gaining better understanding of the diseases that currently claim top honors as people killers and quality of life spoilers. However, it seems unlikely that answers will come in time to save the boomers from their twen-cen diseased fates. All of the current kerfuffle boils down to the frantic thrashing of a doomed generation who have dimly glimpsed a better future, but won't survive the journey and be able to enjoy tomorrow.

IMV boomers would do well to mature at long last, speak more truthfully, have some dignity and courage, and so avoid despoiling society further in their futile attempts to evade their likely fates. That sort of selfishness has been their chief attribute all this while, but enough is enough.