We'll Send You A Pain Pill In The Mail, If It Ever Gets There

President Barack Obama has spent most of the last few years tethered very closely to his teleprompter, moving from fringe candidate in a party primary to become the leader of the free world as the President of the United States. For good reason, his campaign manager Rahm Emanuel and his chief policy advisor David Axelrod have made sure he's stayed "on message" while delivering speeches all over the country and the world. This is nothing new, and it is hardly irregular for a politician to simply read from a speech when addressing the public. Nothing wrong with that.

What's been slightly odd is how much Obama is dependent on his teleprompter for assistance when speaking. For such a gifted speaker, it is odd that he requires the constant use of that machine to help him through his speeches. Again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this; I'm merely making a curious observation.

It's quite curious in light of what happened last week during a town hall meeting the President held, one of several he is attending all over the U.S. trying to sell the public on his proposed health care reforms. It's difficult to use a teleprompter in such environments simply because (unless extremely well staged) it is challenging to predict exactly what kind of queries the President would face from the live audience at such an event. Hence, the President is forced to ad-lib, and more or less shoot from the hip. Theoretically, it's not too difficult for a talented orator such as Obama to paraphrase his ideas on a subject that he has focused on so closely of late.

It's quite curious then that when Obama had to answer a question about how private insurance companies will be able to compete with a public option for health insurance (which would be subsidized by taxpayer dollars) that he had to go a bit off script and talk from the cuff. The video of his response has gone viral all over the net, the crucial point of which was:

"UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. It's the Post Office that's always having problems."

With these words, Obama committed a potentially-fatal political Freudian slip. His point, taken in whatever context you wish, seems to be that a government-run enterprise is far less adept at supplying a necessary service than it's private, for-profit brethren. But the President is advocating just that: he wishes that we replace a privately-run system of for-profit health insurers with a government-run public option.

We all know how recklessly inefficient and slow the "snail mail" carriers seem to be with delivering our things. It's also notable that while UPS and FedEx, as noted by Obama, are consistently profitable amidst difficult markets and changing economic dynamics. Meanwhile, the U.S. Postal Service is enormously unprofitable, having lost more that $6 billion last year alone, and must be propped up by public funds. Long before GM stood for Government Motors or Clunkers could be redeemed for Cash, the U.S. taxpayer was bailing out the USPS due to it's inability to compete in the competitive marketplace.

So let's briefly review: the President wants us to trust us to give up our privately-run, for-profit health insurance to be replaced with a public, government-run option. This, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that another government-run institution is grossly incapable of doing just that. And let's not forget that the USPS only has to deliver the mail and some packages, a task far more trivial than having to allocate life-saving medicines and procedures to patients in need of these resources.

We all know that the Post Office is hardly the only government-run organization notorious for ineffectiveness and inefficiency. Have you visited a DMV or a Medicaid clinic lately? Yet the President insists that the current health care system is untenable and filled with exactly the sort of "waste, fraud and abuse" that other government-run institutions have made famous. He is adamant that without competition from a publicly-backed health insurer, private insurance companies won't be able to allocate health care resource effectively. This appears to be a very troubling argument.

Perhaps he has a point about public and private firms, however. After all, we wouldn't be able to appreciate FedEx and UPS without the mass incompetence of the Post Office to compare them to.