By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Supporters say it will save the Post Office, or at least, keep it from bleeding money.
The United States House has approved the Postal Service Reform Act, an effort to lift some financial burdens from the United States Postal Service and make it fiscally viable. The measure got rare bipartisan support.
Northern Missouri Congressman Sam Graves co-sponsors the measure, which he hopes will put the Post Office on better financial footing.
“We maintain six-day delivery, which I know a lot of rural folks are very interested in, because and I hear this from a lot of my rural senior citizens when it comes to medications,” Graves says. “A lot of folks don’t go into the pharmacy anymore. They get it all that through mail order and they want to maintain that six-day delivery. It’s very important to them.”
The biggest change contained in the measure would lift a requirement that the Postal Service prefund retiree health benefits, a mandate that the service has claimed saddles it with an unrealistic and unnecessary financial burden. Other portions of the bill seek to reduce other Congressionally-imposed regulations in an effort to increase efficiency.
Graves faults the Washington bureaucracy for much of the Post Office’s money problems.
“Washington is so top-heavy when it comes to the postal service that they almost paralyze themselves,” according to Graves.
The U.S. Postal Service is estimated to lose $160 billion over the next 10 years and could run out of cash by 2024. With easy access to online bill paying and even a reduction of cards with greetings being sent over social media, first class mail volume has fallen by more than half since 2001. Still, postal workers deliver to 161 million addresses each day.
The Senate is working on similar legislation.