Friday, March 05, 2010

Life with the public option

The United States Postal Service is facing a $238 billion budget deficit over the next decade and may drop Saturday mail delivery to help cut costs:

The U.S. Postal Service estimated Tuesday that it will lose $238 billion in the next decade if lawmakers, postal regulators and unions don’t give the mail agency more flexibility in setting delivery schedules, price increases and labor costs.

Estimates also predict that letter carriers will deliver 150 billion pieces of mail in 2020, a drop of about 26 billion pieces from last year. Postmaster General John E. Potter plans to press lawmakers and the Postal Regulatory Commission in the coming weeks to eliminate Saturday mail deliveries and allow the mail agency to raise prices beyond the rate of inflation, if necessary.

“We intend to be around for decades and centuries to come,” Potter told a meeting of regulators, congressional staffers and major mail customers Tuesday. “These are the first steps that are necessary to make sure that that occurs.”


So we have the "public option" known as the USPS. Isn't it funny how I can walk into a UPS store and get service on a Saturday; complete with delivery but a solution to the public option is to cut service on Saturday thereby cutting service to the consumer.

That would never happen in health care now would it?

More.....






1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Only a government service could simutaneously raise prices (stamps), cut service quality, and run a quarter billion dollar loss, THEN determine that corrective action would be to raise prices further and cut service quality further. That's a luxury monopolies have.