What Do You Think?

[Looking4Answers]

This is a bit old but I though everyone here might like reading it anyway.

= = = = = = =

Obama's Post Office Gaffe: More True than You Can Imagine

by Joel McDurmon, Aug 14, 2009

In his staged town hall meeting last Tuesday night, Obama made a wonderful gaff comparing his government-run health care plan to the long-line laden Post Office. Private insurers should have no problem competing with a government option, he argued, just like FedEx and UPS operate well in the private sector competing against the Post Office: "It's the Post Office that’s always having the problems!" he exclaimed.

Exactly. So what does that say about the potential of a government-run health care plan?

Believe it or not, his palm-to-the-forehead moment--an unteleprompted moment--is even worse than it appears. For example, the images (realities) of long lines, cold disinterested service, ever-increasing rates, mishandled packages (think malpractice!), now serves as the awakening thought for many of what government-run healthcare will entail (as if Canada, UK, Japan, and others haven’t taught us these lessons already). Worse yet, little unknown details drive home the point: the Post Office is $7 billion in the hole just this year alone. With Medicare already bankrupt, and Social Security not far behind, what makes anyone think it smart to expand the government's role in the life-and-death business?

Not to mention, there is some dishonesty in Obama's comparison: FedEx and UPS don’t really compete with the Post Office because they are forbidden by Federal law to carry normal letters and mail. Law forbids them from carrying "non-urgent" letters. The Post Office is so obviously a monopoly, that a google search for "post office" and "monopoly" puts its Wikipedia page as the third hit.

Nevertheless, in those areas where the Post Office does allow competition, it fails in competition. So bad that it often gives up contracts with its private competitors to get the job done more quickly and cheaply. And guess what? FedEx holds one of those contracts. What does it say about government-run programs when the government itself must turn to private enterprise to carry through. By the way, this means the government must charge more because it pays the private business plus enough for its own in house management of the contracts, etc. Cost plus 20%.

The Heritage Foundation has elaborated on the details even further. One of their gleanings:

The most frightening line from Joe Nocera's New York Times piece is this: "As for Mr. Potter himself, while he may want more freedom to run the Postal Service like a real business, he, too, seemed surprisingly wedded to outmoded ideas about mail service in America. 'This country needs to have and to protect universal service,' he said."

Protecting universal service at the expense of cost, innovation, and quality of care. Sound familiar?

The Washington Examiner simplified it, perhaps even better: "in the end, it is the image that Obama has put into the heads of millions of Americans, the one in which government health care looks like the Post Office, that could do grievous damage to the president's dream of a government health care makeover."

A couple years back, libertarian writer Wilton Alston contemplated a world in which the Post Office had genuine competition. He concluded that we would most likely have more services, lower rates, shorter lines, greater quality of service (no damaged, late, or lost packages), and easier access. But the worst thing is, we can’t know, because we’re not allowed to test it. The government forbids it, which governments always do once they've secured control.

And what happens in the government-run service when they actually acknowledge poor service? Do they fix it? No, they just try to make it harder to detect and prove. That is, they hide it. For example,

At the end of last year [2006], the Post Office did some research and was surprised to find that customers at the nation's 37,000 post offices were not happy about wait times in line. In response, the Post Office came up with a brilliant idea, something that could probably only come from the federal government. They removed the clocks from all 37,000 post offices. Stephen Seewoester, a Postal Service spokesman said, apparently with a straight face, "We want people to focus on postal service and not the clock."

Imagine such a solution in a government-run clinic. "We want you to focus on health care services, not the fact that you’ve waited nine hours and not seen anyone yet."

Yet the fact that the government will not allow competition in something so simple a letter-delivery, despite its failures, demonstrates once again that governments never voluntarily give up power. They can’t admit failure, and they can’t allow competition. They just demand more from their people: more patience, more subjugation, more money.

So when government sticks its nose into health insurance, what will happen when it inevitably fails? You got it: it will stick the system on a money-IV. A steady drip -- debt, debt, debt -- pumped by fiat from the bottomless well of the central bank. This is the ultimate unfair advantage. While the private companies must raise their own capital (for the most part), the government-run system, no matter how big of a failure, will always have fiat-driven subsidies to keep it on life-support.

No system can compete with that.

Obamacare = Post Office. Debts, lines, poor service.

We can thank our president for pointing that out to us.