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Thought for the Weekend:

January 22, 2016, 3:13 pm

From the people who brought you the DMV comes.... Postalcare

postalcare

Tags:
Category: Health Care

25 Comments

  1. sch:

    Looks familiar. OTOH what would you get from Trump? God, I hope I don't have to chose between these two!!

    January 22, 2016, 4:15 pm

  2. John O.:

    The thing about our current political class is that the sheeple voters today never experienced the worse parts of all this Nationalization that Europe did in the 20th Century. Practically everybody in Britain hated the poor economy in the early 1970s. Their government had nationalized their railways, their airlines, their coal mines, their automobile factories, ad naseum.

    In Europe there's still a memory of how terrible this all went, how much things improved when they privatized much it in the 1980s and 1990s, but here in America, we have no memory of this and instead we've become rather infatuated with the idea in with the Millennials. Sometimes you have to take the poison to realize how bad it is. I don't want to but might be the only way for people to learn how much of this is a bad idea.

    January 22, 2016, 6:30 pm

  3. marque2:

    When has Trump suggested we nationalize industry?

    January 22, 2016, 7:52 pm

  4. Matthew Slyfield:

    He hasn't, but sometimes he sounds like he wants to industrialize the government. I don't think that would be much better.

    January 22, 2016, 8:55 pm

  5. tommy ex thom w ex tomw:

    Notice the lack of a visible clock...

    Customers complained about wait times so management removed the clocks. Complaint rates dropped, or so I hear.

    Millenials in my opinion need some practical math skills or they will learn the hard way that you can run out of OPM.

    January 23, 2016, 6:30 am

  6. DaveK:

    I always have figured that if we ever went to single-payer healthcare (cum insurance), it would turn out to be like a mashup between the DMV and the US Postal Service.

    I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

    January 23, 2016, 8:28 am

  7. DaveK:

    They need to put some mirrors in, as well. People get distracted by those things and lose track of time. People complain less about slow elevator service when there are mirrors at the elevator doors.

    January 23, 2016, 8:29 am

  8. jimc5499:

    I've seen the future. I have to deal with the VA.

    January 23, 2016, 12:21 pm

  9. gr8econ:

    As a consumer or as an employee? There are problems for both.

    January 23, 2016, 1:54 pm

  10. Andrew_M_Garland:

    Socialists and Obama admire the British National Health Service as a single-payer government bureau which provides efficient healthcare. It is the endplan for US healthcare. Comparing it to the Post Office is unfair: the Post Office does not intentionally delay service.

    http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/from-the-u-k-another-great-moment-in-government-run-healthcare/

    UK hospitals intentionally delay treatment

    The Telegraph UK - National Health Service makes patients wait "to lower expectations".
    === ===
    [edited] At least 10 primary care trusts (PCTs) in Britian have told hospitals to increase the wait to treat patients, to save money.

    Some patients endured delays of 12-15 weeks after their doctors decided on surgery, although hospitals could have seen them sooner. The allowed maximum is 18 weeks.

    One manager said "short waiting times create more demand for treatment". An NHS watchdog suggested that long wait times cause patients to remove themselves from the lists "either by dying or by paying for their own treatment". PCTs have gamed the system, using maximum limits to delay treatment.
    === ===

    January 23, 2016, 3:43 pm

  11. JLawson:

    I don't see that'll be much worse. Industry has to put out a product that the buyer can use and afford, whereas government doesn't have to be affordable or usable.

    January 24, 2016, 11:12 am

  12. Matthew Slyfield:

    You clearly don't understand the difference between industry and industrialization. Industrialization is a means of increasing output through mechanization and standardizing processes. If you industrialize the government, that doesn't mean that it starts producing affordable and useful things. It means that they can shit on more little people faster. The difference is in the difference between what a business considers output and what the government considers output.

    January 24, 2016, 11:54 am

  14. m1shu:

    They'll put in free WiFi. People won't notice how much time they're wasting in the waiting room when they are on Twitter.

    January 24, 2016, 6:51 pm

  15. xtmar:

    I'm surprised more places with waiting rooms haven't done this, even if it's a mechanics shop or a doctor's office or whatever. It seems like the easiest way to keep the customer happy, even if it's more expensive than a few magazine subscriptions.

    January 25, 2016, 7:00 am

  16. jimc5499:

    I'm a consumer, my brother in law is an employee.

    January 25, 2016, 7:10 am

  17. m1shu:

    The dealer where I get my car serviced has free wifi.

    January 25, 2016, 7:52 am

  18. JLawson:

    You clearly don't read, or comprehend anything beyond what you want to. Starting with a putdown is a great way to convince people just how right you are, isn't it?

    Government is OF the people. People get shit on, they react. They'll vote for people who say they'll stop the shit. When the people saying they'll stop the shit continue shitting on the people, the people getting shit on get pissed at the people doing the shitting.

    DC shits on the rest of the country. They sell us the finest chocolate imaginable, just ignore the fecal smell. They ignore the complaints about quality control, and those who we elect to oversee the process and make changes are themselves going "Hey, we can't really do anything about this. It looks tolerable from here, if not optimal, and we're not able to make changes in the formula without getting everyone in the factory mad at us, so you'll have to put up with it."

    Now we're getting someone that the people in the factory REALLY don't like, saying he can do a better job. Maybe he can, maybe he can't. There's a hell of a lot of institutional inertia to overcome to make any substantive changes. The fact that the folks inside the Beltway are in panic mode looks like a good sign to me.

    But I'm tired of being shit on, and told it's really good chocolate.

    January 25, 2016, 8:20 am

  19. gr8econ:

    There are two sets of problems here. The one we usually complain about is that everyone must go to a monopoly provider. The one we don't talk about is when a provider must provide service to everyone that shows up. I remember a long serving school board member noting that charter schools really helped his school district because now there was an alternative for parents that didn't like what their particular school was doing.

    When disgruntled customers can't go elsewhere it can be really rough on the employees.

    January 25, 2016, 8:59 am

  20. Nehemiah:

    Trump favors universal health insurance. I'd call that nationalizing an industry.

    January 25, 2016, 9:37 am

  21. MJ:

    Warren has mentioned this before, but rationing by quantity/queueing is really the only cost control mechanism that government-run/single-payer systems have at their disposal. It's always good to see examples of this in action.

    One wonders if the single-payer advocates would be so staunch in their support if they knew that this was how the cost savings were actually achieved.

    January 25, 2016, 5:18 pm

  22. MJ:

    You don't have to choose between these two.

    January 25, 2016, 5:21 pm

  23. Noumenon72:

    I just had this exact experience today for the first time ever, because I moved to a big city. Little rural towns have more government money than they deserve with a lower cost of living, so there are no lines and people who live there think the government works way better than it does for the majority.

    January 25, 2016, 5:35 pm

  24. marque2:

    Um, when was this, 15 years ago? You can even claim Newt Gingrich supported nationalized insurance, if you consider dopey ideas from decades ago.

    I believe his platform is to get rid of Obamacare and nationalization.

    Lets not falsely disparage Trump. Disparage him on the real merits of what he says.

    January 27, 2016, 1:54 pm

  25. tommy ex thom w ex tomw:

    They know, they just choose to believe 'It won't apply to me and my friends, or fellow liberals..."

    January 31, 2016, 9:18 am