Kyle Smith, writing for The New York Post, takes us for a tour of his local US Post Office. Remember that Barack Obama himself pledged that the new ObamaCare would run like that institution.
As you wait in line, Mr. President, amid dingy, trash-strewn surroundings and people sighing heavily and checking their watches, observe the time-warp effect. It’s like you have left fast-moving Manhattan and zapped yourself into the Deep South in 1934. Picture a drowsy moment in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
A clerk who has finished with one customer takes a good long pause to settle herself, exchange pleasantries with friends, arrange her workspace and so forth before she lights up the little box and asks for the next customer. If you arrive at her window before she has turned on this light, she will curtly send you away. Don’t crowd her! You’re just the customer.
There are always one or two supervisors lurking in the background, but unlike, say, the fast-thinking action man who is a whirl of authority at the Wendy’s I go to in the Rockefeller Center concourse, these supervisors never encourage their employees to keep it moving, never take a turn at the till themselves, never parachute in to fix snafus. I’ve never seen any of them do anything except . . . supervise. They’re as useless as mall cops.
If you should have to pick up a package, go to the window in the corner. Usually there is no clerk here. There is a doorbell-like buzzer. For a year or so it was labeled “Broken.” So if you need a package, just stand there for a while. Someone will come by . . . eventually.
Please, go read the whole piece. It is a stark reminder of what an indifferent bureaucracy has done to a once state of the art industry. That, my friends is exactly where ObamaCare would take the US health care industry. To a trash-strewn wasteland run by civil masters rather than civil servants. They’ll make the decisions – when they get around to it – you’ll wait in line. They’ll decide if you get the hip replacement or the pills – don’t bet on the former.
Keep pushing back folks. Unless you want to be bent, folded, spindled and mutilated by a bureaucracy run amok.
Americans are getting better at one thing only: obeying.
An astonishing statistic from Wikipedia “Going Postal”:
With less than .75% of the full time civilian workforce, the US Postal Service produces 13% of employee on employee killings.
How long until the national health service has similar numbers?
Ouch. That is a really ugly statistic.