Absolutely right. However, as long as we are on the subject, the USPS should not be delivering ad flyers door to door for pennies. It's a monumental waste of resources, and something that should not be subsidized in any way. In fact I think it should be banned. barfo
To be fair, I do believe the USPS is the only entity allowed by law to deliver letters. We don't know if FedEx could do it cheaper or better.
Not really true. My wife's business ships thousands of packages a year. Nearly everything is by USPS because it's just cheaper and more convenient. We've looked at UPS and FedEx, and for our particular parcels it just makes more sense to go USPS. We ship stuff that's either under 5 ounces or qualifies for Media Mail. It's shocking how cheap and efficient it is. We probably have one mis-shipment a month, and a lot of the time we suspect theft at the delivery location. UPS, in comparison, lost one package from a vendor last week. (We get about a dozen or so UPS shipments a month, so that's a much bigger error rate.) From my experience, the USPS is the least likely to fail at performing to expectations. As for profitability, UPS, FedEx and the USPS have all had really bad years. The economy sucks. If people buy less stuff, they need less stuff shipped. Add in increases in bandwidth on the internet, and it's pretty easy to see why they all are struggling. Anyway, I do see some similarities between this and health care. The USPS in the analogy is the public option. FedEx and USPS are the private insurers. Each seems to fill a particular niche, but each has drawbacks. It's hard to imagine a private company building the infrastructure needed to replace what the USPS does, and it's hard to see how private industry would want to insure, say, a 50 year old man with terminal cancer.
Maybe you could argue that it's crowded out in our country by the USPS. But you would think that if it was possible to replace that industry, some country somewhere would ditch their postal system and let FedEx or UPS or a local private carrier manage it. Yet in country after country it's always been a government-initiated program. This, again, is why I'm always so suspicious of the idea that there's a truly free market solution to delivering health care. If it is possible, why isn't it being done somewhere? How come there's no shining beacon of free-enterprise health care that all free marketers can point to and say, "Look, XYZ country is doing it! We can too!" Instead, all the examples of health care success (lower cost, higher satisfaction) are found in countries with more left-leaning systems than ours. Similarly, the lowest cost/highest satisfaction solution for delivering very small parcels and letters in pretty much every industrialized country is a government initiated (and perhaps quasi-privatized) postal system.
I meant this: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3111 US Postal Service: A Government Protected Monopoly by Edwin Feulner (September 23, 2003) If I tell you, "The check's in the mail" you probably won't look for it any time soon--if at all. But if I tell you I've sent the check via FedEx, you'll probably plan a trip to the bank. We know we can count on private services such as FedEx and United Parcel Service to deliver on time. If they didn't, they'd go out of business. And we also know--many of us from bitter experience--that we always can't count on the post office. That's because the post office is a government-protected monopoly; 19th century laws make it illegal for anyone else to deliver letters. It's also exempt from state and federal taxes and free from most government regulations. That combination is a recipe for disaster. A recent report from the President's Commission on the United States Postal Service recognized these problems and recommends creating a Postal Regulatory Board to supervise the post office. This would be a welcome step, but we shouldn't stop there. The overall goal is to make the post office more efficient and user-friendly. That's why it's time to break the post office's monopoly and privatize the delivery of mail. Right now, there's no competition in the letter-delivery business. Almost all letters must be sent through the post office, unless the letter is "extremely urgent." The post office even gets to set the minimum price its private competitors can charge: A letter must cost at least $3 or twice the applicable first-class rate to qualify as urgent. But if Congress changes the law, private companies could go head to head with the post office. Competition would bring down prices, and the post office would have to become more responsive to customers if it wanted to survive. ---- more at the link. I suggested a public option where no govt. money is put into the system or taxes raised to fund it. That would be the equivalent of USPS competing against the obviously successful package carriers.
It shows had a single company in the private sector was bad at making good, efficient business decisions. Care to show some examples of really well run, efficient government programs?
Yet USPS is experiencing huge deficits. Clearly there is a reason they are able to deliver certain types of packages for cheaper... they aren't held to the same profitability requirements as a private company. BTW, when I have had packages to send, I found the opposite as you for cost and convenience. Sure, the economy is going to have ups and downs. These cycles are a huge part of what makes the public sector so inefficient. They don't or can't scale back when they need to. Private companies scale back in bad times. Some public programs pay people to sit in a room, doing nothing. I am fine with the argument that there are people who don't have coverage, and need coverage. But, these healthcare proposals should not be campaigned with the idea that overall healthcare spending will go down, or that a public healthcare system will somehow be cheaper and more efficient (with the same level of care) than the private sector.
What squirrelly point is this thread trying to make? That private for-profit companies are more efficient in generating profits than government programs that by definition focus on serving the general population (in other words, things other than profits)? It's like trying to compare apples to oranges and being excited because you've discovered apples and oranges are different. Nice work, Sherlock.
A major claim of those who favor nationalized health care is that the government can do it more efficiently than the private sector. It's fair to ask about any precedents in government programs where they do actually do something more efficiently than the private sector.
How many government programs directly compare to the private sector? Very few, because the private sector will always focus on profit generators and exclude notprofitable ones. Gov't porgrams never really have that luxury. To reverse the argument, how effective do you think for-profit companies would be at guaranteeing health coverage for those who can pay zero for it, have pre-existing illnesses, etc. Honestly, I think the best approach in this is probably some combo of private and public programs. Let the private side handle what it's good at, the public side what it's good at and then add some incentives/disincentives to the private side to make it more worth their while to serve a broader base of the population. I can't imagine a solution that's purely private or purely public being optimal.
So what you're saying is that the congress people and Obama and his staff are lying about the govt. being able to do health care more efficiently (at least cost) - enough to cover everyone that isn't covered and presumably without losing any of the quality of health care delivery we have now. Fair enough. Like I wrote a few times now, I favor a public option that is not funded by tax money or cutting other programs. Make it semi-profitable like the USPS. A little competition for the profit making companies is a good thing. Once the govt. insurance company is off the ground, then we can address things like subsidizing the cost for some people. Otherwise it's going to start off as a money drain and that's only going to get worse as it does just about everywhere else. And I do mean govt. insurance company - selling health, life, malpractice, auto, etc. insurance.
Are you going to ask the same about Microsoft, Google, WalMart or thousands of other consistently profitable companies? Find one business the government runs that turns a profit or is run more efficiently than the private sector.
Because of the downturn in the economy, fewer packages and letters are being sent. Currently the USPS has a significant excess in employees. Their solution isn't to lay those people off like a private company would, but to "excess" them to another region. That's no way to run a company you want to just break even (the USPS doesn't seek to make a profit, just not to lose money). I wonder if we have government-run healthcare, how many of our new government employees will be "excessed" instead of laid off in senior living once the baby boomers die off and demand for those services drop off a cliff?
