Unwittingly, Obama has pledged to bring to health care all the inefficiency, waste and lethal employee angst of the U.S. Postal Service.
In an attempt to reassure a man from a town hall audience who was worried that ObamaCare would crowd out and ruin private health insurance, Obama channeled Joe Biden and uttered the mother of all gaffes:
"Not to worry, Obama assured the man. Private companies happily compete against the federal government all the time.
"'I mean, if you think about it . . .', Obama said, halting warily as if he realized he was about to make a terrible mistake.
"'If you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right?' he said, half-joking yet completely serious. 'It's the Post Office that's always having problems.'
"Exactly.
"Obama promised a new health-care program every bit as inept as the Postal Service."
"On the one hand, the President remarks how great his public health care plan will be. On the other hand, he notes it won’t be good enough to crowd out your private insurance, i.e. the Post Office comparison. So which is it Mr. President? Will it be so great that private insurance disappears or so awful that it isn’t worth creating in the first place?"
What an incredibly tangled web.
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These words very well may go down in history, defining precisely why Democrats fail to get their big-government-style health-care reform done during this quickly closing window.
