Let’s watch the President’s celebrated comment on the success of private sector package delivery services as compared to the flailing public option so we can put his remarks in context:
He’s trying to tell us that a public option won’t crowd out the private providers already there. But, that’s not what we learn by studying this example. His comparison show much more effective the private options are and betrays a limited understanding of the industries he’s comparing.
Let me explain. In the world of parcel delivery, FedEx and UPS were created long after the Postal Service, that is, the public “option” preceded the private ones. According to the Post Office’s website, it was founded in 1775, with the appointment of Benjamin Franklin as the first Postmaster General. By contrast, the forerunners of the companies which would eventually be known as UPS and FedEx were founded in 1907 and 1913 respectively.
In the health care arena, however, the President is proposing the exact opposite, a new public option created long after the private ones.
And those two companies have grown in large part due to disatisfaction with the Postal Service. And today, while the private companies are, in the president’s words, doing “just fine,” the public one is “having problems.”
That is, the very creation–and marketplace success–of these companies was due to resourceful individuals, on their own, meeting a need the government-backed industry could not fulfill. Over the years, as the federal government has relaxed some (but not all) restrictions on the postal service’s monopoly on parcel delivery, these companies (and other package delivery services) have continued to find new markets, improving delivery across the country and earning profits for their shareholders.
Were Pesident Obama to apply the lesson of the success of FedEx and UPS to the health care industry, he would advocate the kinds of deregulation that facilitate the entry of new private companies into the market for health insurance.
I’m thinking that our president isn’t as smart as we were told.
It should also be mentioned that the U.S. Postal Service exists because the private sector is by law (by force) crowded out of postal delivery of any mail whose postage is set at or below the USPS rate for a standard letter. Anyone who charges and sends letters at that rate will be prosecuted.
USPS is a monopoly by intent. Obama’s comparison is absurd and is an unwittingly perfect illustration of exactly why we cannot afford a national health care system.
There is no point in a private company trying to “compete” with a taxpayer-funded company in the same space. If it succeeds, the taxpayer-funded company will simply allege that the competition is inefficient for the taxpayer – i.e., bad for the public – and get the competitor legislated out of existence, or at least into a much smaller market space.
As GPW points out, the USPS is a special case because, in an unexplained fit of wisdom, policymakers decided that deregulation and competition in parcel delivery would be good. But the winds are blowing in the exact opposite direction in medical care, where leftists eternally call for ever-greater regulation and, when among themselves, confess that the public so-called “option” is much-more-than-a-Trojan-Horse to bring about single-payer. As soon as a public so-called “option” is passed, then, any sane (or profit-maximizing) insurance company will withdraw from competition with it, if necessary liquidating itself, or at least restricting itself to specialty segments that the public so-called “option” is designed never to cover. Thus, the vast majority of Americans will quickly be forced to the public so-called “option”.
Uh Oh. For the last week, Obama and Big Pharma have been denying they had a secret quid pro quo deal to promote ObamaCare. Guess what? They were lying.
Your president is a big fat liar, and he just got caught. Again.
I loved it when I heard our President start to compare UPS Fed Ex and the postal service. I couldn’t believe he would go down that path at all. Then I thought….boob. Dummy. Without the ever present teleprompter, he’s lost again. hehe
Go do another fake town hall meeting Mr President. Go get some more pre screened 12 year olds to ask you questions.
Boobs, dummies and liars.
Our post office has “Assembly Point A” under an oak tree right outside the front door. At least they have figured out how to round up the largest possible target when someone goes postal. Sometimes I go there at noon on Monday just to watch the patrons suffer. It is way more entertaining than a UPS office.
I don’t think it matters in this case, but isn’t the USPS a GSE?
#1 – “I’m thinking that our president isn’t as smart as we were told.”
Leah, I’m thinking that our president isn’t as smart as he thought he was.
Nothing but a spoiled man-child pretending to be an adult.
Regards,
Peter H.
Actually folks, it was me who asked the question that led to the long and winded response that included the USPS/FedEx/UPS comparison. I can honestly state no one pre-selected me for a question. I wish I had the opportunity to debate the President on that analogy but all I could do when he looked at me and asked…”Did I answer your question?”…I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head no…BUT I smiled to show Republicans are not all ‘evil mongers.’
The only way it would be comparable is if all 3 USPS, UPS and FedEx, had to use another 4th company to deliver all packages (i.e. they can’t deliver directly), and the 4th company was mandated by law to not reject USPS but forced to take their packages at the rates USPS decide to pay.
Then it would be the same as healthcare now. Where that 4th company represents doctors and hospitals, and USPS is the public option, and the UPS/FedEx other insurance companies.
Then you’d see the USPS push the others out of business, due to paying so little the 4th delivery company would have to raise prices on everyone else.
So in the beginning, the public option would sound great, and customers would like it because it’s cheaper, because the other companies and customers are subsidizing it. But once everyone else gets run out of business and you can’t take their money, that money has to come from somewhere, and it will come from taxpayers.