'The Coming Plague' author catches a nasty bug.

Conceding the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980, Edward Kennedy told the delegates at the Democratic National Convention:

We cannot have a fair prosperity in isolation from a fair society. So I will continue to stand for a national health insurance. We must—we must not surrender—we must not surrender to the relentless medical inflation that can bankrupt almost anyone and that may soon break the budgets of government at every level. Let us insist on real controls over what doctors and hospitals can charge, and let us resolve that the state of a family's health shall never depend on the size of a family's wealth.

As fanciful beasts go, bipartisanship is more like a T. Rex than a unicorn—it actually roamed the earth once. Take 1965, for example. Lyndon Johnson had just clobbered Barry Goldwater by 16 million votes in one of the most lopsided elections in U.S. history; Democrats outnumbered Republicans 68 to 32 in the Senate and 295 to 140 in the House. Yet when the jewels of Johnson's "Great Society"—Medicare and Medicaid—came up on the congressional docket, Democrat Wilbur Mills sat down with rookie minority leader Gerald Ford to craft a compromise bill. Six months and more than 500 alterations later, the Social Security Act of 1965 arrived in the Oval Office with the support of 13 Republican senators and 70 of their House colleagues.

Of all the sideshows to the Great 2009 Health Care Debate, the Whole Foods boycott may take the prize as the most unexpected.

Last Wednesday, John Mackey, the chief executive of Whole Foods, took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to opine that “we clearly need health care reform,” but arguing against the solutions being put forward by the administration: “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.”

Mackey went on to offer eight ideas for reforms, including these four:

• Remove the legal obstacles that slow the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings accounts (HSAs).

• Repeal all state laws which prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines.

• Enact tort reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

• 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.