Conservatives always trumpet "free market capitalism" while bashing government services %26amp; subsidies.
FedEx %26amp; UPS will not deliver to many remote rural areas - because it's not -- you guessed it - profitable.
The United States Postal Service delivers to every single address in the country, regardless of where you're located - because the USPS does not operate solely on the basis of profit. This is no different than Health Insurance companies that operate solely on the basis of profit. The USPS operates primarily as a social service to the people. Nationalized Health Care in Canada does not operate on profit. Nationalized Health Care in Canada is also ranked higher than the Health Care in the US according to the World Health Organization.
FedEx %26amp; UPS says "delivering to your remote home is not profitable. So screw you."
USPS says "profit isn't our main goal, your welfare is - so we will deliver."
Corporate Health Insurance Companies says "your ailments aren't profitable to us. So screw you."
Nationalized Health Insurance says "we are required by law to cover you for any of your ailments."
Conservatives are unwilling to admit that the free-market is not perfect and does have its flaws. A system whose goals exists purely to maximize profits, even bypassing the general welfare of the people to attain those goals, is a flawed system. And where those flaws lie, is where government programs should fill in to correct. Which is why a government mail service should exist alongside corporate mail services.|||The right-wing absolutely loves the largest socialist institution in America: the military. Leading capitalists absolutely love corporate subsidies and bankster bailouts. The only time they hate socialism is when it benefits the underclass. Socialism for the rich is greeted with open arms.|||excuse me,the post office is not socialist,it is a service the government is required to provide by the Constitution.don't put words in our mouths or make claims that conservatives feel a certain way. read the Constitution and you will know what the federal government is suppose to do,that is what conservatives want|||If your a liberal, you cant be convinced about the economy. Your side is unconvinceable. Just spend, lower interest rates to 0%, be as irresponsible as you can with trillions of dollars and everything will be ok? True?|||The USPS is very cheap, they come in to the officee with an envelope demanding 6 cents if i want it. Also they wont deliver to my house since i have a steep hill. also po box why does anyone need those?|||but what about those of us who don't want to subsidize shipping your qvc garbage to your remote trailer in bummfluck nowhereland?|||Because they're not hemorrhaging money?
ditto healthcare...|||The U.S. Postal Service is nearly bankrupt.|||Funny how the government has to give more and more millions to USPS and they don't to FedEx or UPS!!! Wonder why that is?|||I'm not even a conservative, but the USPS is millions in debt. Isn't that something to look at?|||http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/5617鈥?/a>
Please study the cancer mortality rates in "nationalized" health care countries. There is and will be rationing here if that happens and get used to waiting for any type of service.
Now you use the postal service as an example of socialism working well? You mean the same postal service that is going broke and now will be limiting delivery days. Imagine a day when Health care goes broke and it will, I guess we can limit the days we can be treated for ailments/disease.|||When the US Postal Service began offering a public option of overnight delivery, FedEx rates dropped by a couple of bucks. Of course, conservatives have forgotten this. The US Postal Service rate on shipping a package ground delivery is often $1 - $3 less than FedEx or UPS. The Postal service will deliver a first class letter for 44 cents; the minimum UPS charge is $13, again proving that private enterprise does it better and cheaper, lol.|||I don't have anything against the USPS, Fedex or the UPS. In fact they all do a fine job. Nor do all conservatives always trumpet "free market capitalism". "Free Trade" is responsible for a huge deficit of trade that's been bleeding hundreds of billions of dollars out of America every year since it started. We need protective tariffs. We also need to stop increasing the national debt. Paying the interest on the national debt to foreign investors also bleeds hundreds of billions of dollars out of America every year.
I freely admit that free-market is not perfect and has flaws, but the government is not perfect and has flaws too. The problems with the "health care reform bill" are the $849 billion (at least) price tag and that it would force people to buy insurance. Sure there are some issues with health care that need to be addressed, but that doesn't mean spending another trillion and dictating that people must buy from the insurance companies is going to make things better.
It looks for all the world that the plan is to thoroughly exploit another "crisis" at the public's expense.|||Sure, the postal service delivers regardless of where you live, but it is also losing money. They lost $3.8 billion alone last year, mainly due to the abundance of email and electronic delivery of messages. They've almost hit their $15 billion cap on how much they're allowed to be in debt to the US Treasury. That being said, I'm perfectly happy with the postal service. They delivery care packages and letters to my husband in Afghanistan for half the price of Fed Ex and UPS. Am I going to run to them every time I need something mailed? Maybe not. But they're there for my basic mail needs.
What makes the current mail system we have great is that people have the freedom to choose. No one is forced to use the USPS if they don't want to. They can pay more for a more "reliable" service like UPS or Fed Ex. But those of us (myself included) who have such a giant volume of mail coming into and going out of our houses, USPS offers basic, affordable, and in my opinion still reliable delivery services.
What USPS is considering doing now is cutting corners...halting Saturday delivery, skimping on future health benefits for retirees, and discussing every other day mail delivery. For mail, that's not too damaging. But if those are the issues the postal service is having, it's not something I would look for in a health care company. Unlike the socialized mail system, socialized medicine deals with people's lives. They can't start cutting corners when it comes to people's health.
There's a role for private mail delivery companies just as there is a role for private health care companies. A system controlled by one extreme is going to fail...an all-socialized healthcare plan isn't going to be any better than an all-private one, which is why I'm in favor of a dual-payer system.
People need to be able to have the ability to choose, to pay for their "better" care or settle for the bare minimum in times of financial hardship.|||"FedEx %26amp; UPS will not deliver to many remote rural areas - because it's not -- you guessed it - profitable."
This is false. FedEx and UPS will deliver to rural areas. And if there are areas that they cant get to, they contract work out to deliver to those far unreachable places.
"The United States Postal Service delivers to every single address in the country, regardless of where you're located"
This too is false. There are indeed some places that are way too rural for the USPS, so you have to collect your mail in a free of charge provided PO box in the center of some nearby town
"- because the USPS does not operate solely on the basis of profit. This is no different than Health Insurance companies that operate solely on the basis of profit"
False. Most insurance companies in this country are indeed non-profit. The ones that do earn a profit, only profit about 2 cents for every dollar. Guess what? The Book publishing industry earns more money and higher profits than the health care insurance industry.
"The USPS operates primarily as a social service to the people"
Thats a laugh.
"Nationalized Health Care in Canada does not operate on profit"
And thats why its in trouble.
http://www.angelfire.com/pa/sergeman/iss鈥?/a>
"Nationalized Health Care in Canada is also ranked higher than the Health Care in the US according to the World Health Organization"
That ranking has long since been debunked for the fraud it is.
___________________
"Philip Musgrove, the editor-in-chief of the WHO report that accompanied the rankings, calls the figures that resulted from this step "so many made-up numbers," and the result a "nonsense ranking." Dr. Musgrove, an economist who is now deputy editor of the journal Health Affairs, says he was hired to edit the report's text but didn't fully understand the methodology until after the report was released. After he left the WHO, he wrote an article in 2003 for the medical journal Lancet criticizing the rankings as 'meaningless.' "
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12560805鈥?/a>
So what's wrong with the WHO and Commonwealth Fund studies? Let me count the ways.
The WHO judged a country's quality of health on life expectancy. But that's a lousy measure of a health-care system. Many things that cause premature death have nothing do with medical care. We have far more fatal transportation accidents than other countries. That's not a health-care problem.
Similarly, our homicide rate is 10 times higher than in the U.K., eight times higher than in France, and five times greater than in Canada.
When you adjust for these "fatal injury" rates, U.S. life expectancy is actually higher than in nearly every other industrialized nation.
Diet and lack of exercise also bring down average life expectancy.
Another reason the U.S. didn't score high in the WHO rankings is that we are less socialistic than other nations. What has that got to do with the quality of health care? For the authors of the study, it's crucial. The WHO judged countries not on the absolute quality of health care, but on how "fairly" health care of any quality is "distributed." The problem here is obvious. By that criterion, a country with high-quality care overall but "unequal distribution" would rank below a country with lower quality care but equal distribution.
It's when this so-called "fairness," a highly subjective standard, is factored in that the U.S. scores go south.
The U.S. ranking is influenced heavily by the number of people -- 45 million -- without medical insurance. As I reported in previous columns, our government aggravates that problem by making insurance artificially expensive with, for example, mandates for coverage that many people would not choose and forbidding us to buy policies from companies in another state.
Even with these interventions, the 45 million figure is misleading. Thirty-seven percent of that group live in households making more than $50,000 a year, says the U.S. Census Bureau. Nineteen percent are in households making more than $75,000 a year; 20 percent are not citizens, and 33 percent are eligible for existing government programs but are not enrolled.
For all its problems, the U.S. ranks at the top for quality of care and innovation, including development of life-saving drugs. It "falters" only when the criterion is proximity to socialized medicine.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/article鈥?/a>
WHO's Fooling Who? The World Health Organization's Problematic Ranking of Health Care Systems
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_鈥?/a>
_________________________
"Corporate Health Insurance Companies says "your ailments aren't profitable to us. So screw you."
"Nationalized Health Insurance says "we are required by law to cover you for any of your ailments."
True. But they are not required by law to provide your treatment on time, much less provide you with quality health care.
"Conservatives are unwilling to admit that the free-market is not perfect and does have its flaws"
Wrong. We do admit that. We always have.
"A system whose goals exists purely to maximize profits, even bypassing the general welfare of the people to attain those goals, is a flawed system. And where those flaws lie, is where government programs should fill in to correct"
When government programs come to fill in to correct, only one thing happens: It makes matters worse.|||Did the Post Office create nationwide overnight delivery? No, they copied it and use private carriers such as DHL to do it internationally because they cannot do it efficiently.
.
Do UPS and Federal Express offer reduced rates for massive delivery of the messages most people want the least, advertising circulars, and carry the cost on the backs of messages which people really want? No, the Post Office does.
How is delivery to every address 6 days a week a benefit when it results in increased rates for everyone else? I live 17 miles from the nearest town and I understand that it would be far more efficient for me to go into town once or twice a week, or even better receive an online notification that I have mail available, and stop by the the post office rather than send a truck out here every day often carrying nothing at all for me or, even worse, a stack of advertising circulars which will go straight into the fireplace.|||You got any links to back up your rant?
We have a ranch in a remote part of the country...just barely got our first traffic light and we're able to use both UPS and Fedex.
Anyhow, Fedex and UPS is a business. The USPS is in fact the responsibility of the United States Government under the U.S. Constitution and not some Socialist program. That is the problem with you kids now days, you've never read the Constitution and lack the understanding of it and what it does.
"The United States Postal Service (USPS) is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for providing postal service in the United States. It is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution."|||Car dealers still waiting for payments from cash for clunkers.... Our health care system has millions of transactions daily.... Obama never was a manager even for a Seven-Eleven store [No financial business experience] WHY WOULD DEMOCRATS WANT OBAMA TO RUN [ruin] OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY'S HEALTH CARE! I am sick of Obama demonizing insurance companies. The insurance company with the biggest refusal of coverage is Medicare {Government Insurance}. If democrats push this health care through we will have instant higher taxes. I think we will see many protests hundreds of thousands strong nation-wide such as during the Nixon years. Our country is financially on the edge of cliff as is. The people of America are at BOILING POINT. I hope the likes of Pelosi, Reed, Obama have to face courts/hearings for all their corruption. To the democrats who want to vote for this I say... Wake up! Look at the last year. Everything Obama tries to do fails. Only a traitor to America would vote for such a freedom killing nation destroying government control health care system. You might want to think about your safety too. If the country is in outrage over this corrupt legislation and we have Rodney King type instant riots.... You could very well be a target for destroying everyone's livelihood. This is the age of computers. We all see who vote yeah and nah. Myself.... I'll fight at the poles this November.|||well I'm Australian, and the way people talk about Canada's HC system they make it sound horrible, nothing but queues as far as the eye can see, and now that I've checked the WTO rankings you guys are 2 spots above us, even though the longest queue I've ever been in is 2 or 3 hours, I don't know what to believe anymore, but the Americans would like our system better because we have a private health sector.
I don't understand what jack is talking about, keeping interest rates artificially low and spending into deficit is common between both conservatives and liberals, the only person I've heard say otherwise is Ron Paul.|||They only say that because they want to pitch in so the CEO can have a multi million dollar bonus, Why they think that is the thing to do? I cant figure it out.
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