Somebody in the administration should sit the President down and explain to him the unintended consequences of making a really bad analogy. Yesterday he committed a doozie when he said:
[I]f the private insurance companies are providing a good bargain, and if the public option has to be self-sustaining -- meaning taxpayers aren't subsidizing it, but it has to run on charging premiums and providing good services and a good network of doctors, just like any other private insurer would do -- then I think private insurers should be able to compete. They do it all the time. I mean, if you think about -- if you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? No, they are. It's the Post Office that's always having problems.
Michael Turk at The Next Right, points out the fallacy of the analogy:
So that raises the next point of failure in his argument. It's not like FedEx and UPS were doing it first, and the government created a new mail delivery vehicle to force FedEx and UPS to lower their costs. FedEx and UPS, to the contrary, sprung up in response to a near complete failure of the government option. They arose from the ashes of countless lost packages, and inefficient government bungling. They recognized a market for reliable package delivery.
What on Earth would cause the President to point out yet another failed government program as a reason to support a government takeover of health care? As a supposedly smart person is he really so unaware of the meanings of his own words?
Read Turk's entire post here.
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