Where I live, instead of bringing mail to my house, the United States Postal Service has set up one of those pedestals with a box lock box with twelve slots where my incoming mail is deposited. So I have to walk about 100 feet from my front door to retrieve my mail. I am sure this is done so that the mail carrier can zip up in their truck and efficiently deal with mail delivery, and zoom off again. Of course, any efficiency in the process for me is offset by the fact that I typically only bother to check the box two or three times a week. Saturday I went to check my mail, and as I walked over, I realized it had been since Tuesday that I had done this last… Well, apparently three days of mail to the Fleischman household is about the limit for my mailbox, as I was greeted on Saturday with an empty box, except for one brown slip of paper, which indicated that because my box was full, all of my mail would have to be picked up at the local post office. Groan!
So, I got in my car, and drove over to my local post office. Of course I was nervous heading over there because nothing good ever comes out of a trip to the post office. This trip, of course, was no 
exception. As I approached the lobby, the people waiting around outside was a harbinger of things to come. I don’t know about how your local PO works, but in mine, you enter and grab a slip with a number from one of those machines. The clerks at the counter call off numbers and then advance the worlds largest LED display up on the wall. My slip said 68 and they were on number 31! Nice. So I settled in for what promised to be a long wait…
While waiting, I started to chat with a couple of other people who were also waiting in the lobby — a younger couple with a baby (who was pleasantly sleeping). We got to talking and the mom said that she wished that this Post Office were as efficient as her doctor’s office. I asked what she meant, and she made the keen observation that when she goes in to see her doctor, they take appointments, and she seldom has to wait too long. She also jokingly waved her little ticket and said in a loud voice intended to be heard, "..and at least at my doctor’s office I AM A PERSON and I am NOT A NUMBER!"
Of course I couldn’t miss the opportunity to make a quip about how Arnold the Democrats in Sacramento want to get government involved, in a major way, with the healthcare system in California. This young mom said, "Yeah, I read that. I thought Arnold was a Republican?"
I asked her, and it turns out this young family is all Republican (of course, I do live in Orange County, so the odds were good). Dad weighed in saying that this post office was a great example as to why you do not want the government involved with healthcare. As he so aptly put it, "we would spend all of our time waiting to see the doctor, and when we saw him, the doctor would probably be the equivalent of some tenured political science professor who still talks about the Soviet Union as if the wall never came down."
The mom chimed in, "Don’t people come FROM Canada TO the United States for major surgeries and such?"
I recounted a story I had just read on Senator Tom McClintock’s website about that very thing, and about how a Canadian woman was giving birth to four children at once (what are the odds of that? very long!). She crossed the border into the U.S. to have her quartuplets. And she was not the only one, others do this as well, as our medical care here in the U.S. is superior to that in Canada, and as a predictable result of government’s involvement in their healthcare system, there are long wait to get care (how long can an expectant mother of even one child wait?).
Well, the wait took a while, and I got to the counter, only to be informed that my carrier had not yet returned to the PO with my mail, and that since they were about to close, I would have to return on Monday.
I don’t know if it was a coincidence that that little baby started crying as I was told this news, but it was certainly appropriate.
Let’s hope that efforts by advocates of big-government in Sacramento to move our healthcare in the directly of more government controls are unsuccessful. Their recipe for ‘fixing’ the problems with our health care system are in the wrong direction. Increasing the government’s role will diminish the quality of healthcare in California. It’s a bad idea.
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