With the health-care debate heating up, my mind wanders to find something the government runs efficiently. After four light years of pondering I couldn’t find anything so I settled on the United States Postal Service. I believe it’s a applicable comparison to private and public health-care options. On one side you have FedEx and UPS, on the other is the USPS……United States Postal Service. One a bureaucracy the other two inspired by capitalism and the incentive to make a profit. I’m not here to bore you so let’s take a quick glance at their performance over the last year given the latest financials.
Even with paying income taxes those evil capitalists FedEx and UPS managed to make handsome profits. Unfortunately, with the benefit of no income taxes the USPS was only able to come within a stones throw (aka loss of 4.7 Billion) of that glorious break even point. The news gets worse. USPS is projected to lose $7 Billion dollars in FY 2009 and a cool $7 Billion more in FY 2010. Hopefully, UPS and FedEx flourish so they can pay all those taxes to subsidize the government ran USPS. For the life of me I can’t seem to transpose the efficiency of the USPS into a government run health-care system that is supposed to eliminate the current inefficiencies of private health-care.
PS> I’m a goober but from what I can tell these numbers and information are legit and are a lamens way of looking at the private vs. public debate in apples to apples terms…..But then again what the hell do I know?
