I wish everything ran as well as the post office

Media Matters has a clip with yet another conservative attacking health reform by comparing it to the post office. I'm sure you have heard the... um... argument, for want of a better term. If you like the way the post office runs, you'll looove gummit-run health care!



Well, I happen to love the post office. I wish everything worked as well as the post office. I consider the United States Postal Service one of the true wonders of the modern world. For 44 cents, I can drop an envelope into a blue box in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the USPS will deliver it within a couple of days to Buffalo, New York; or to San Diego, California; or to Wasilla-freakin-Alaska. And it will happen exactly that way every time I do it. How great is that?

I wish everything I used in my life worked as well as my government-run mail service. If the barbecue restaurant down the street from my house performed as well as the USPS even a fraction of the time, I'd never eat anywhere else. I wish my neighborhood supermarket was as efficient at providing service to its customers. Have you been to Walmart lately? How did that customer-service experience work out for you?

If conseratives really want to marshall a coherent argument against health reform they're going to have to do better than Henny Youngman-era one liners about the post office. I'd suggest they throw in some material about airline food, but they stopped serving meals on planes a long time ago as a cost-cutting measure. That's the private sector for you.

Oh, and they might want to come to terms with the inconvenient fact that Medicare and Medicaid are already government programs. But then, that would require them to admit that the government is actually quite good at making affordable, quality healthcare available to American citizens. Kind of steps on the narrative.

Better to just keep making stuff up, I guess.