health insurance

A public health insurance option can work well

(IN FORUM) - I’m a veteran, and I’ve heard and read a lot lately about the proposal for a public health insurance plan in the national health care reform. After listening to the arguments for and against, it made me think of my own job with the U.S. Postal Service.

As we all know, private health insurance plans, and even those run by “nonprofit” organizations like in North Dakota and Minnesota, can refuse to provide their plans and services to anyone they choose. If people have pre-existing conditions, which basically means if they’re too sick and therefore likely to require care, private insurers can, and very often do, deny coverage.

The same goes for delivering packages. For-profit shipping companies such as UPS or FedEx could refuse to deliver a package if its destination was too remote or too difficult to reach, meaning that they would lose money on the job.

But my employer, the Postal Service, cannot do that. We must serve everyone in the country, no matter what. We are the “public option” in shipping, much like a public health insurance plan would add an option in addition to private, for-profit insurance in the area of health care.

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