President Himself Highlights Future Rationing of Health Care: Lessons from the Postal Service

Though it’s been done before on the Right, the president himself has compared a public option (or whatever it’s called today) for health care reform to the Post Office, competing alongside private companies a la FedEx and UPS in harmony.

In this moment, the president gave opponents of a government-run plan a great opportunity: the chance to take him at his word and highlight the problems with running health insurance like the mail. I’ll leave aside the broad funding issues and the fact that the Post Office is looking for side jobs to make ends meet. What interests me more is the issue of rationing.

Every day, mail delivery is rationed.

Sounds bizarre, right? But it is 100 percent accurate. It wasn’t too long ago that the mail was delivered twice per day. When it came time to cut costs, service was cut back to once daily, 6 days a week. That cut in service–i.e. rationing–sufficed for some time. Now, the Post Office wants to nix Saturday delivery or, alternatively, a slower day like Tuesday, and doing so would require action by Congress to undo their 6-day per week mandate. Plans to shut down some local branches are also in the works.

And don’t forget that receiving your mail in your mailbox is only one small piece of the larger Post Office puzzle. The mail you open was sorted and shipped in a complicated process that can occur after hours and on the weekends. Perhaps losing Saturday delivery service doesn’t bother you, but how will closing local branches and stopping Saturday service affect sorting and shipping, and thus delivery the rest of the week? Will mail still move on the weekends? If you drop a letter in the mail on Friday, and it’s not delivered on Saturday, does it just sit until Monday to wait to be sorted and shipped?

It sparks lots of questions and few answers, which brings us right back to health care reform. The government is in an incredible amount of debt and will need to (gasp!) cut costs eventually if our republic is to continue. The easiest way to cut costs for the Post Office has been to ration service–and we’re about to see increased rationing with mail delivery down to only 5 days per week.

The president himself compared a public option to the Post Office; why should we think the operation will be anything different?

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Related posts:

1. OFA National Health Care Forum with the President
2. Government Intervention Drives Up Health Care Costs
3. Health Care Rationing: This Parody Isn’t All That Funny

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 12:59 am and is filed under Politics and Capitol Hill. The entry is tagged under fedex, health care, post office, postal service, rationing, ups, usps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.