President Obama said the following in his recent town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire:

They do it all the time. If you think about it, UPS and Fed-Ex are doing just fine. It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems…. there is nothing inevitable about this somehow destroying the private marketplace. As long as it is not set up where the government is being subsidized by the taxpayers so that even if they are providing a good deal, we keep having to pony up more and more money.

Lew Rockwell has written an article, Obama and the Post Office, in which he shows how that Obama’s simple admission gets to the heart of the problem. If the government run and supported Post Office can’t stop losing money, how does anyone expect health care to be different? As Rockwell points out the only reason the Post Office accomplished anything (while still losing money) is that the law prohibits any competition in certain areas of it’s business.

When the government can’t compete in an area of business, laws are passed to either make the competition illegal or at least lots more difficult.

The entire text of President Obama’s town hall meeting can be found at the New York Times with the statements mentioned here being located at page 9.