The Left's Census, Post Office, and Healthcare Follies

The Left here in northern California has an incredible faith in government, quite unlike the Left of thirty or thereabouts years ago. For example, they want a single payer system for healthcare, the total abolishment of private insurance companies; in other words, a government monopoly.

Not long ago Alice and one of our leading leftists were comparing notes about another government program, the Census. Every ten years the Census lays an egg in our area, since the Post Office will not do home delivery in our rural area, and the Census will not allow post office box delivery of the mailed Census forms. Therefore, all the Census forms mailed to our area are returned to the Census office as undeliverable, since they are addressed to our property addresses instead of our Post Office boxes.

Knowing this to be the case, we do a variety of things to comply with Census requirements, such as getting forms from a local non-government social services office and mailing them in.

However, even after we do that the Census hires and sends in an army of Census workers hired outside of our area and therefore paid wages plus transportation, lodging, and meals expenses to come here and go house to house to complete the census. The landlady of one of the downtown inns said June was her best month in years because she was full of Census workers. At the same time, we had an abnormally high rate of unemployed in our area who, if hired by the Census, could have worked from their homes and saved the government the expenses of the out-of-towners, plus cut down on unemployment and welfare benefits paid to locals.

After I filled out and sent in our census form ahead of the deadline, Alice and I went on an African safari vacation. When we came back we found notices from three different census workers, two pinned on our front door and one on a side gate we rarely use. They had made their calls over two weeks after we sent in the completed form.

(The Census chief says that their shaky computer system won't be a problem in getting an accurate census. For more about this, click here.)

We called one of the numbers and answered the same questions that we had previously provided via mail almost a month before.

When Alice and the prominent local lefty discussed this, Alice asked: "Is there anything the government runs well?" and the Lefty replied: "The Post Office."

At this point, we need to recap that the root of our Census problem every ten years is that the Post Office will not deliver mail to our home addresses, and will not put mail addressed to our homes into our post office boxes - even though the Post Office employees know our names and our box numbers from memory.

Meanwhile, every week day United Parcel, Federal Express, and other delivery companies drive throughout our lightly populated rural area delivering to our home addresses. Frequently their service is amazing. I'll buy an item over the internet in the evening, and often the next day it will be delivered to my door, even though I haven't paid extra for expedited delivery.

And concerning healthcare, the very low Medicaid (called MediCal in California) reimbursement rate drains so much money from our small local medical center that evening and weekend services have had to be reduced severely. In Texas many doctors are dropping Medicaid patient service completely because they can't afford to provide it.

Yet the Left wants the government to run more things.

I know what the Left is smoking, because this area is one of the leading sources of marijuana, but its users say that it's supposed to be harmless.

Not if it makes the Democrats think that the government should run everything, it isn't!