I have to disagree with my esteemed colleague, ObamaNerd : Boycotting Whole Foods, while it may not shut the company down or save Obamacare, is the right thing to do.

First, a personal caveat: I love shopping at Whole Foods. For half an hour, I get to be a yuppie in paradise, wandering among aisles of gorgeous cheeses, pristine produce, prepared foods more beautiful than what I could ever make at home. (And, my God, the walk-in beer aisle!) Whoever designs their stores has done a tremendous job of speaking to upwardly mobile consumers (and upwardly mobile wannabes): Going to Whole Foods is like worshiping at the altar of aspiration.

That said, I'm never going back. Here's why.

As has been widely reported, last week, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey came out loudly and publicly against health-care reform, arguing speciously for the "Whole Foods alternative to Obamacare."

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.

From the rest of his editorial, it's clear that what Mackey means by "individual empowerment" is that employees with the temerity to get sick should shoulder more of the burden of already sky-high health care costs. Employers, meanwhile, should naturally pay less. Item one on Mackey's agenda:

Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs). The combination of high-deductible health insurance and HSAs is one solution that could solve many of our health-care problems. For example, Whole Foods Market pays 100% of the premiums for all our team members who work 30 hours or more per week (about 89% of all team members) for our high-deductible health-insurance plan. We also provide up to $1,800 per year in additional health-care dollars through deposits into employees’ Personal Wellness Accounts to spend as they choose on their own health and wellness.

Money not spent in one year rolls over to the next and grows over time.

In Whole Foods' case, that "high deductible," Mackey goes on to note, is "about $2,500." That's the amount you have to pay, out of pocket, before your health care even kicks in. Starting pay at Whole Foods is about ten bucks an hour. At 30 hours a week, after taxes, that $2,500 deductible works out to about two and a half months of a Whole Foods "team member"'s salary.

Maybe you'll be lucky—maybe you won't get sick, and you'll get to "keep" that money the following year (assuming you stay at Whole Foods). Then again, maybe you won't.

Maybe you'll get cancer, or hit by a car, or any of the other million very expensive things that can go wrong in life. Then you'll not only have to cough up $2,500—you may be unable to work. Under Mackeycare, unexpected illness or injury is a "lifestyle choice" (yeah, he actually says that), not something unforeseeable.

Oh, and whatever you do, don't have a "preexisting condition" like diabetes, arthritis, or a previous cancer scare, because Mackey wants to make it even easier for insurance companies to deny benefits for any reason whatsoever:

• Repeal government mandates regarding what insurance companies must cover. These mandates have increased the cost of health insurance by billions of dollars. What is insured and what is not insured should be determined by individual customer preferences and not through special-interest lobbying.

No more "government mandates" saying, for example, that insurers can't deny you coverage on a whim, or because you smoke, or because they find out you were once treated for depression.

If you thought your "insurance" policy should be just that—an insurance against unforeseeable future health problems—think again: Under Mackeycare, not only are you going to pay more and your employer pay less, employees are going to be able to decide by a majority vote what your health care policy covers.

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.

And hey, if it turns out your coworkers don't want to cover your expensive degenerative disease, too bad, man, because this is a democracy. Health care is a privilege, not a right, and it's no one's fault but your own if you were born with bad genes.

What about the uninsured? Mackey has a plan for them, too:

Finally, revise tax forms to make it easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the millions of people who have no insurance and aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! Whoo, that's a good one. "Make it easier" for people to give voluntarily—because it's our complicated tax system that's kicking 14,000 people off the insurance rolls every day! As Sadly, No! notes, if every one of the 140 million US taxpayers donated $10 a year into such a fund, "we could provide $28 worth of care each year to the 50 million people who are uninsured. ... enough to go buy some aspirin, a pint of vodka, bandages and a knife so you can cut your tumor out your own damn self."

But we haven't even gotten to my favorite part yet. That's the part about how if people weren't so damn fat*, they wouldn't need health insurance. Because "most of the diseases that kill us" are preventable "through healthy lifestyle choices."

You read it here first: Buy lots of healthy shit at Whole Foods, live longer, go without insurance. Except, you know, if you live in a situation where those "healthy lifestyle" choices are unaffordable or don't exist. Then you're shit out of luck. Survival of the fittest, baby.

* See also: Making fat people pay more for health insurance. Because obesity, unlike every single other preventable disease, should be a punishable offense.