USPS fail...

USPS fail and medical care...  No surprise in a USPS fail, right?

For years now we've routinely tracked the progress of packages shipping from Amazon to us.  The vast majority of these packages ship via Fedex or UPS, and the tracking for them is easy, fast, and accurate. 

But every once in a while, an Amazon seller will ship to us via USPS, no doubt to keep the cost down.  Usually this is via one of the “priority mail” boxes that don't charge by weight, and the item is something heavy.

That just happened to me: a couple of woodworking clamps are headed my way, and the seller sent them by USPS last week.  Four working days later, the USPS tracking number still shows “No information available”.  I cannot recall even one instance in which the USPS tracking system actually worked.  The items I ordered shipped on March 8th, and the USPS estimates delivery on April 24th.  The first time I saw such a ridiculous estimated delivery time, I was quite alarmed – but the package actually arrived in quite the timely fashion, as have most of the others.  I can only guess that the USPS sets the estimate so long so that no matter how badly the screw things up, they can still claim an “on-time” delivery.

The USPS likes to claim that they are not a government agency, and technically they are correct.  However ... for any practical purpose, they really are a government agency: their subsidies, rate regulation, employment regulation, Congressional oversight, the franking privilege, etc. make them effectively one even if technically they are not. 

My point is that the kind of awful service delivered by the USPS is always what we get when we let the government run something.  As a veteran of the U.S. Navy, I can attest to the almost unbelievable amount of economic waste in the military.  All of us know how wonderful the DMVs are, especially in the blue states (where government bureaucracies have run the furthest off the rails).

So how is this related to medical care?  Like this: the progressives in this country deeply, desperately desire our healthcare to be a so-called “single payer” system, meaning that the Federal government pays for it all.  The UK's NHS is their model.  This is the connection, and the part I least understand: what they want is for the same “quality” of the USPS, or DMVs, to be applied to our healthcare, too!  At least the damned post office won't kill me!  Talk with any UK residents about their three month waits for an MRI, or their relatives who died of cancer while waiting for diagnostic tests, and you'll see our future should a single payer system ever be put in place here.  What I simply cannot understand is why anyone wants this!

Who wouldn't want some effective corporate organization (Amazon, anyone?) to take over the USPS?  I'd be willing to wager that the quality would go up and the price down – so long as there was competition...