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Letter Carriers Refute Health Care Opponents’ Smear Campaign
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Here’s the latest example of how far opponents of health care reform will go to stop the real changes the nation needs.
An “issue brief” released by the House Republican Caucus this week attacks the United States Postal Service (USPS) and its 700,000 employees nationwide in what the Letter Carriers (NALC) union calls a “transparently partisan attack on the health insurance reform legislation now being considered by Congress.”
Workers across the country are fighting back against the lie-filled campaigns by extremist groups—some funded by corporate donations and backed by extremist Republican leaders who are vowing to kill health care reform.
The NALC is setting the record straight about the misinformation campaign being waged by the Republicans against health care reform. In a public memo, the union issued a point-by-point response to the House Republicans.
NALC President Fredric Rolando says:
This smear cannot go unanswered. This attack on America’s most-trusted agency is deliberately misleading and unjustifiably undermines public support for the Postal Service.
The NALC says misinformation about the Postal Service is being used in the most dishonest way to discredit the government’s ability to provide high- quality services in an affordable way.
Specifically, the NALC memo says the Republicans’ statement that the Postal Service does not pay for itself is just wrong. In fact, the USPS is self-funded and receives minuscule appropriations to pay for free mail to the blind and military voting.
Another untrue claim by the Republicans is that the cost to consumers to mail a letter has increased. The truth is the price of a first-class stamp has increased by 33 percent over the past 10 years. But adjusted for inflation, stamp prices are no higher now than they were in 1970.
The memo also points out studies that show the Post Office’s level of service is as good or better than commercial delivery companies and cheaper.
The bottom line, the memo says, is:
The shoddy and misleading…brief issued by the Republican House Conference is an insult to the 700,000 men and women who are working so hard to help the Postal Service survive this national crisis. The House Republicans should withdraw it and give the American people what they deserve: an honest debate about the need for health care reform.
Read the entire memo here.
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1 Comment
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The injection of the post office into the health care reform debate is a huge red herring. The USPS is not “government’run,” it’s not a monopoly, it’s not tax-supported. It does have a universal service obligation which is not shared by its for-profit competitors, which allows them to “skim off the cream” and place the USPS at a competitive disadvantage. USS is stuck with the job of handling unprofitable deliveries which for-profit outfits like UPS and FedEx are free to avoid.
Unfortunately there’s a very real danger that the “public option” health plan being proposed by the White House would face a similar challenge–providing coverage to all those whom private insurers consider it too costly and unprofitable to insure, thereby driving up its costs. The solution is not to get rid of the public option but to simply have a public plan, along the lines of Medicare, that covers everybody.
Some public monopolies make sense. Police and fire departments are a monopolies. Monopolies become a menace when they gouge the public for the private profits of a few.
Unfortunately Unfo