The government should fix their own mess and leave healthcare alone
Carolyn Hileman
The president keeps bringing up the U.S. Postal service in comparison with FedEx and UPS, as an example of how private companies can compete with government run agencies. A poor comparison simply because at no time has it ever become illegal to use another company to mail a package, at no time if you wished to change your delivery service were you required to use the government run service. However, since he brought up the subject, let's look into that government run service right now shall we? The U.S. General Accounting Office's Phillip Herr testified to Congress last Thursday that the U.S Postal Service "desperately needs to restructure, to remain viable. While there's been talk of knocking out the Saturday deliveries, the one that seems to have caught citizen's attention is a list of offices subject to closure. The Postal Regulatory Commission, an independent agency charged with regulating the U.S. Postal Service, published a list of 681 post offices that are under consideration for closure.
681 just imagine if that were hospitals, clinics, doctors offices, 681, and who knows if the bleeding will stop there. Could you afford to see your hospital closed because the government could not keep it open? Could you afford to drive where ever there was an open hospital? Unlike the postal service, you do not have a hospital or clinic just down your driveway or on the curb so how far will you have to go to get treatment and once there how long will you have to wait? ER visits today are long and arduous at least two hours on a slow day, what will it be like when people from other counties are forced to go to the same ER??? The Post office is guided by union rules, a great job if you can get it, paid vacations, high starting pay, and days off, just about anything they want including paid holidays; you have noticed they don't run on holidays. I know more than once I have made that long trek down my driveway only to remember once I got there it as a holiday and the mail would not run. Just imagine having to drive two to three counties over just to find out it was Presidents day and the Hospital is closed.
After the revelation that the post office was considering closing 681 branch offices I was surprised the president continued to use this analogy, I would have thought someone would have told him that is not really a good one right now, but either they didn't or he did it on his own but the fact remains it is not a good one if you want to sell us on the idea of government run anything. The fact is the government can't fix its own mess so they want to experiment with healthcare. If someone came into your office looking for a job and listed this as an accomplishment, said that it was a good example of what they could do, you would show them to the door. I think the government should fix their own mess and leave healthcare alone.

