Curmudgeon's Corner

The Post Office & Health Care

Posted by Al Campbell on March 25, 2010

Economy, Healthcare, Political, Quality of Life, U.S.

The U. S. Postal Service (USPS) has been in the news for the past several weeks since it announced its intent to cut back to five-day per week delivery schedules.  The USPS has suffered significantly from the ‘assault’ on its primary service sector by e-mail.  It delivered some 213 billion pieces in 2006 and is projected to deliver only 150 billion pieces in the year 2020.  The slide obviously is expected to continue.

It has also suffered from the ‘assault’ on its business model by the major private competitors, United Parcel Service (UPS) and Fed-Ex.  UPS has been hit hard by Fed-Ex as well given the heavier union-driven wage/benefit packages that it has to support.

We will get less service while we can expect the cost of stamps and other USPS services to continue to increase.  This will likely not be the last service reduction we’ll face, either.  The trends are not good for the USPS.

I cannot help but think about the country’s move toward government-driven health care reform and wonder what the scene will look like in 2020 and in 2030 and beyond.  That is sort of the reverse of the postal service.  No one gave any thought to a private sector solution for delivering mail.  Who could’ve conceived of a UPS or of a Fed-Ex or of e-mail when the mail first began to be delivered on horseback across this country?

The private sector, however, developed better solutions, and those better solutions will eventually end the life of the postal service certainly as we know it today...unless Congress decides it must do something to stop the inevitable…and that will only delay the outcome that is so apparent or ruin the results we now expect from the two major private sector organizations if they are brought down to the level of the USPS by government intervention.

On the other side of the slate is the thrust to inject more and more government into the health care system that is largely a private sector industry.  The medical treatment breakthroughs of this century were private sector breakthroughs in very large part.  The medical equipment advances were largely private sector advances.

I cannot fathom why we might wish to have the government, which fails at something so much less difficult to control, involved more and more directly in controlling the health care industry and the product that we are able to receive.  There is not a motive of improving the latter so much as there is the desire to bring it under the control of the government.  If that can be done, and it appears that will be the outcome, then the government has near-absolute control over the citizenry.

Was there not a better way to accomplish the avowed goals of uniform access to care across the citizenry than to bring the rest of the citizens down to level that will exist after our government gains the control it wants?  Was there not a less costly manner in which the supposed 35 million could’ve been given health care?  Less costly both in terms of dollars and in terms of damage to the existing status quo of health care?

When has the public sector gotten to a better solution than the private sector other than in those things constitutionally left to the federal government?  I can’t think of much on that side of the ledger offhand.  That certainly isn’t represented by the Veterans Administration health care system.

Are we a decade or two away from the government announcing that health care will only be available five days a week?  Isn’t that sounding a lot like England?

The still-present fervor for “change” has been, in my opinion, perverted by those who used it to achieve their electoral goals.  I suspect that they were a bit disingenuous in claiming things other than their real goals for the country knowing they needed to tread lightly until they had complete control.  Things like, “you can keep your health care if you like it” were enough to fool enough people.  The reality is simply this:  your present health care isn’t going to survive in the artificial world being created by this Congress and this President.  There is but one possible outcome given the way this reform package is rigged; the nasty insurers will be unable to continue in business and then the government will just have to step into the breech it has created to save us once again.  And that is spelled:  p-u-b-l-i-c  o-p-t-i-o-n

Devious but effective.

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The Curmudgeon Blog today is titled To Control The People".