Anyone who thinks that the Federal government will be good at managing our health care should visit the post office. They are getting their asses kicked by UPS and Fed Ex and email and still it’s the same old garbage. I visited to mail a package the other day at lunch and there were twelve people ahead of me in line and the line didn’t move, then it did move, glacially (well, we need a new metaphor there) and there were two clerks and at least two other people in the building who showed their face now and then to do whatever, they weren’t dealing with us poor slobs (customers) waiting out our lunch hour to mail a stinking package. Can you imagine doing that with your kid to get a flu shot? (Well, OK, it’s a bad example)
The problem isn’t that management doesn’t know what the problem is, it is that they can’t do a damned thing about it because there’s a strong union. So instead of fighting the union it plods along toward extinction like the dinosaurs, a beeline to the tar pits of history. The post office, with its 75 year old murals and 50-something clerks who have their salary and their benefits and their retirement and can’t care less whether the place is open for business 15 years from now, won’t be in business much longer. It’s rather a pathetic scene, the same old “I surrendered my free will to the union and the bureaucracy” employees and a whole new generation of dull, lifeless customers who stand in the line like good soldiers wonder when it will change. Well, I am here to tell you it won’t unless the doors are closed on that institution forever. Is that how we want to run health care?
The Federal government is going to have to close the post office soon enough due to competition and texting. It’s almost a dead institution anyway, what’s the relevance of sending a card when you can send one online for nothing? What’s the point of it all? I say close it all down now. It’s losing money, it costs a fortune and there’s nothing that Fed Ex, UPS, and all the others won’t pick up in a heartbeat anyway.
I call on Barack Obama to close the post office. I say it first, before Rush Limbaugh (I think), and I am right, like Rush Limbaugh says he is.
But what about health care? You’re probably saying, wait a minute, you wrote in favor of it not long ago. Well, I am in favor of changing the existing system that is hideously expensive. We need something, but after visiting the post office and being reminded about the hopelessness of a Federal bureaucracy in my life, I think I’d rather not thank you. I think I’d rather pay high prices and not stand in line like a mindless sheep on vicodin (or is that a Tiger?).
Poor Tiger’s children.