Deliberately sabotaging the Postal Service

Senior Chief wrote:1st class postage in the USA is 55 cents. First class postage supports all the junk mail spam that everyone received.. Junk mail cost the sender less than a letter. If all junk mail paid the same amount as 1st class postage perhaps the post office would not be running at a loss...

How many people actually sit down and write a letter, place in an envelope, place a stamp on it and mail it. With the advent of tech, social media, smart phones, very few people mail letters. Corporations are doing away from sending out invoices/bills and fewer people are mailing in their payments. It is done by directly debiting bank accounts or credit cards. The post office is a bankrupt business model where most of the overhead is in employee expenses, facilities, and equipment that cost more than the revenue of postage.

I have always thought that the post office should be done aways with and given to corporations to run. The USPS should only be used for government mail.

Sell off the building and vehicles to some private business and let them handle the rest of the mail/packages.

I have family members that are current and retired employees of the post office so I hear how badly things are run.

Just MHO for what it is worth so flame on as people usually do...

Others have already addressed the monetary issue, but as for privatization:

Privatizing the USPS basically means no mail to a portion of the US. It's simply not profitable to send mail to more remote places (and those are the places that need mail more as Internet connectivity is often lacking there). Even now, Fedex and UPS use the USPS to send some of their mail.

Senior Chief wrote:SNIP
I have always thought that the post office should be done aways with and given to corporations to run. The USPS should only be used for government mail.

Sell off the building and vehicles to some private business and let them handle the rest of the mail/packages.

SNIP ...

we've had a lot of privatisation in the UK of government services and it has not usually gone well!

It always amazes me that those keen on that policy never call for the privatisation of the Tax & Revenue services!! Think of all the scope for profit and graft!!!
Sheriff of Nottingham come back to life.

On the other hand, perhaps they fear that a private company might go after those [such as themselves] hiding their ill gotten gains more effectively! All sorts of potential downsides HAHAHA

Every single time a large infrastructure service has been privatized (whether that be rail, telecom, roads, public utilities, mail), the result was a worse service for the customers while a bunch of useless idiots enrich themselves.

There are services that cannot, should not and must not be put into private (read: profit-oriented) hands.

Lots of interesting insights here. We have a lot stronger tradition off things being private. Yet we also have a quite a bit of public infrastructure.

Highways are public. The drawback has been the difficulty of appropriating enough for maintenance. We have a huge repair backlog on roads.

Telecommunications has been largely private, but strongly regulated to maintain some competition. Mixed bag here. Coverage is spotty. Lightly populated areas tend to suffer with cable, phone and internet. Where I am at is pretty good.

Healthcare is largely private, kept going by a mix of public and private insurance. The VA is completely public. The care on the private side is excellent if you have access, which, of course, is dependent on whether or not you can afford insurance. That is expensive. It has been said that we get half the healthcare at twice the cost compared to other industrialized countries. On the plus side, many of our hospitals are also doing some of the best research in the world.

Going completely public would, I am afraid mean that the system would be kept financially starved like the VA and, I might add, the highway system. The difficulty is that everything gets politicized to the point where I am not sure that the politicians can be entrusted with the healthcare system. It is sort of dammed if you do, dammed if you don't.

Don

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Don. I'll respond. Firstly I don't claim that our health system is perfect, but from reading the press it does appear to be better for the common person than that in the US.
We have an underpinning of Medicare, which is a government agency funded by a specific levy of (from memory) 2% of taxable income. It provides free essential medical care for all citizens nation wide. Many doctors "bulk bill" to it but some charge an additional surcharge. Hospitals include public and private ones, and that does cross over at times.
Essentially if you go to your GP with appendicitis, and are broke, you will get a bed in a public hospital, a competent surgeon and cured at zero cost. If you go to your GP needing a knee replacement, it gets tricky. If you are broke you go on a waiting list, and it may be a year or so. If (like me) you are OK financially, and in a private health fund, you get into a private hospital, and fixed quite quickly.
I agree that the US has world leading medical research, but would point out that very situation means that the brightest researchers from around the world do go there for the opportunities. So it is somewhat of a joint effort. For our population we have also had our share of medical breakthroughs as well.

n7axw wrote:Lots of interesting insights here. We have a lot stronger tradition off things being private. Yet we also have a quite a bit of public infrastructure.

Highways are public. The drawback has been the difficulty of appropriating enough for maintenance. We have a huge repair backlog on roads.

Telecommunications has been largely private, but strongly regulated to maintain some competition. Mixed bag here. Coverage is spotty. Lightly populated areas tend to suffer with cable, phone and internet. Where I am at is pretty good.

Healthcare is largely private, kept going by a mix of public and private insurance. The VA is completely public. The care on the private side is excellent if you have access, which, of course, is dependent on whether or not you can afford insurance. That is expensive. It has been said that we get half the healthcare at twice the cost compared to other industrialized countries. On the plus side, many of our hospitals are also doing some of the best research in the world.

Going completely public would, I am afraid mean that the system would be kept financially starved like the VA and, I might add, the highway system. The difficulty is that everything gets politicized to the point where I am not sure that the politicians can be entrusted with the healthcare system. It is sort of dammed if you do, dammed if you don't.

Don

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Don.

It might be trite, but ...

GoFundMe was invented in the USA for medical bills.

Medical debt is apparently the biggest cause of personal bankruptcy in the USA, and pretty much non existent in much of the world with socialised medicine.

Please understand that I'm not denying anything said in the posts above. The question is if we at the present time could sustain it politically. That is what would control the funding. In spite of all the mealy mouthing about what we owe the vets, the VA is kept on a starvation budget and is severely understaffed which often makes access difficult...despite which they often manage good care, I might add.

Or think Obama care. It was a reasoned program that at the moment is hanging by a thread in the courts. Republicans furiously oppose it even though the way it is structured came largely from the Heritage Foundation back in the nineties. They failed to kill it outright so now the tactic is to try to starve the subsidies built into the program, hoping that the courts will come down on their side and do the job for them.

The difference between you and us is that you have the social consensus to sustain your healthcare programs and your politics reflect that. We have that with social security and Medicare for seniors. But not with universal healthcare. Not yet.

Politics around here are madworld. No reality or logic involved, I'm afraid.

Don

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