1. He’s a member of the evil 1% that the Left wants to tax into oblivion.
2. He’s the CEO of a Fortune 500 firm, a giant corporation – Boo!
3. Based on his initiatives, his company has used market-based reforms to keep their company health-care costs flat since 2005, while industry costs have risen 38%.
4. He founded the Coalition to Advance Health care Reform.

Give up? Mr. Burd is CEO of Safeway Incorporated. As remarked above his company has headed a company health-care plan that has kept costs flat. The Safeway plan capitalizes on two main themes –

1. 70% of all costs are the direct result of behaviour.
2. 74% of all costs are confined to heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity.
   
3. Therein, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable, 60% of cancer, and over 90% of obesity. Safeway takes the above data and assumptions and balances company premiums based on several main factors – tobacco usage, maintaining a healthy weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Talk about a stark contrast to the Kennedy bill which implicitly casts a blind eye on upon behaviour and healthy/harmful habits. Socialism versus market-based reform, simple as that.

Intrinsically, Safeway Inc. and Mr Burd’s program stops the trend in health-care inflation, ie. rising costs. I am reminded of yesterday’s read of the Kennedy-Dodd bill. Nothing in that bill would address the rising cost paradigm, it simply puts a socialized blanket over the whole system, a solution that will do nothing more than exacerbate the problems in health care. The difference is that you as a taxpayer will be footing the bill for your fellow man. Individual initiative versus collectivism put on display. The free market always has a solution if it is allowed to work, the Safeway alternative proves that.

Based on how effective this problem is, I would venture to say that the Obamanation’s mentor Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, rule #12 will come into play if the Safeway solution is deemed in public discourse to be a safer way….

#12 – “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.” Click here for the list, here, for the Alinsky Obamanation connection.

Update 1 : Investor’s Business Daily has a great piece today here that shows that the AMA is expressing concern regarding the so called ”public option”, releasing a statement saying that it would “threaten to restrict patient choice.”

Update 2 : So called ‘moderate’ Dems, Blue Dogs are unifying in fear the the ‘public option’ may crowd out private insurance. Story here.

Update 3 : Why Mommy is a Palin Supporter has my two pieces up, she has specific points of urgency to stop this march to socialized medicine too.

Update 4 : I must be doing something right at the Left Coast Rebel, I am blessed to have some of the smartest, most articulate readers in the blogosphere. These from yesterday’s socialized med piece I wrote –

Nick from It’s Just My Opinion wrote –

“This is a socialized medicine conversion, 100%, no room for misinterpretation or private industry competition whatsoever.. It’s also not nearly as obtuse as the backdoor socialism the Obamanation is imposing on the banking industry through regulations on TARP banks, after forcing the banks to take TARP money. At least this is a straightforward and direct adoption of socialism, with no pretense of being anything else. There’s always a chance that this will finally be the abuse which is atrocious enough to push the people over the edge, and galvanize the resistance to the tyranny of the Obamanation (here’s hoping).”

Conservative Generation from New Conservative Generation wrote –

” I don’t understand why people are so surprised that health care costs so much. Hospitals have surgeons sitting around reading magazines on the chance someone needs emergency surgery. It is absolutely inefficient, but this is what people want. I’d rather pay higher prices to have him sit there just in case I need him.People need to stop thinking that they can have it both ways. You either get amazing health care for a lot of money or mediocre health care for a more affordable price. Or mediocre government health care for a more expensive price.”

Ananda Girl from Oodles of Funch, a personal story –

“I am always against the government being involved in my life in any way. I learned the hard way. I have unfortunately used government programs in the past and decided that I was far better off with no insurance than the hoops and red tape involved with Oregon’s health plan. I gave up. They did stupid things… such as assign my kids to a dentist who lived 65 miles away from us. Not one, but two towns over. That dentist then forced us to sign a paper saying that we understood that we were not allowed to make compliant against shoddy care or to sue if a mistake was made. This I was told by the OHP folk was perfectly acceptable! They refused to allow me to switch dentists.
I pay for everything myself now. it is worth it to me to avoid the headache involved when dealing with the government. I should also mention that we had to re-do the red tape paper work every 3 months and it would take them a good month and a half to decide if we were going to be accepted. So half of the time we could have been using it was wasted. It was in short a nightmare mess! The Fed. will not do any better. I guarantee it.”

And lastly, Red from Caught Him With a Corndog – “What is with this embrace of socialist policy by the American left? Where is this coming from? It has to be miseducation and disinformation. I like my choices. I work for my choices. And guess what? Right bout of the gate everybody has options. Everyone has choices and has made them. It’s what the individual does with the choices the individual makes that matters. I’m sorry if some folks have made bad choices and find themselves up a creek when it comes to health care but don’t expect me to a) pay for yours and b) acquiesce to further tax penalties if my employer and I aren’t on a “federally approved” (read: not worth the paper it’s printed on) health care plan. We recently switched providers because our current plan went up 29%!! We are in for a fight people.”

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