8/21 UPDATE:Â U.S. Postal Service spokesman Gerry McKiernan just dropped me a line disputing Peter Roff’s take on the post office’s tax exemption. First, the Postal Service doesn’t own any planes on which it could pay taxes. Secondly, the Postal Service for many years was not allowed to run profits as a corporation does, meaning it had no income on which it would pay taxes, even without the exemption. (A 2006 reform allowed the Postal Service to turn a profit on competitive products like Priority Mail and package services, but in lieu of taxes, the post office uses some of that…
Browsing: health care
The National Association of Postal Supervisors has fired back at President Barack Obama for dragging the U.S. Postal Service further into the health care debate. In an Aug. 14 letter, NAPS President Ted Keating accused Obama of using the Postal Service as a “scapegoat” and unfairly painting it as “an example of inefficiency” during a health care town hall meeting last week. Obama told a crowd in Portsmouth, N.H., Aug. 11 that private health care insurance providers should be able to compete with a government-run public option because “UPS and FedEx are doing just fine. … It’s the Post Office…
As the debate over health care reform boils over, both sides are now using the U.S. Postal Service to score points. House Minority Leader John Boehner, June 11: If you like going to the DMV and think they do a great job, or you like going to the post office and think it’s the most efficient thing you’ve run into, then you’ll love the government-run health care system. And President Barack Obama at this afternoon’s health care town hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., as reported by the Associated Press: [Obama] also disputed the notion that adding a government-run insurance plan into a menu…
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Edolphus Towns said in a letter yesterday that the health care bill now before Congress would require “some administrative and a small number of benefits-related adjustments” to some plans under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. Those changes would be necessary to make sure all FEHBP plans meet the government’s standards of a “qualified health benefits plan,” Towns said in his letter to Ranking Republican Darrell Issa. The health care bill, HR 3200, would require all citizens to have a minimum level of insurance coverage through a qualified health benefits plan or other form of…