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Medicare is more efficient than the overwhelming majority of private insurance companies. Insurance companies would operate very differently if they could char

Medicare is more efficient than the overwhelming majority of private insurance companies. Insurance companies would operate very differently if they could charge prices based on what their customers would cost them. It would also help if employer-provided health plans didn't have such huge tax advantages. And Medicare provides a different set of services. It would be as if the government mandated that 1) instead of buying meals, you had to buy the right to eat at a restaurant--but the restaurant could not charge different people different amounts based on how hungry they were or what they liked to eat, and 2) companies could buy food for employees at a tax-advantaged rate. If that were the case, food would suck, and one could imagine free government-run cafeterias that provided cheaper, better service. Social Security also has super-low overhead, less than most funds (although lower returns than many funds as well). Their return is zero, minus administrative costs. When you invest money in a mutual fund, they buy stocks with it; they don't use it to pay off the previous investors, and spend the rest on their pet projects. That's illegal. The federal government is actually better at pure administration than the majority of private companies, because they're constantly under the threat of getting the axe and have a mandate to do their job rather than take paychecks home. I would like to meet some of these government employees who actually fear losing their jobs. Where did you find them? The lower salaries don't hurt, either. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/private-vs-public-sector-pay/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/private-vs-publ... Government workers make vastly more than private sector workers. If you're ideologically opposed to the existence of even a perfectly run Medicare and SS, of course, that's a different story... It's clear from the data that I don't need to be.

kalvin 17y ago
- Do you think people should receive necessary medical treatment based on ability to pay? That's the alternative universe where health insurance companies charge based on cost. - Should the government should try to hire younger, less educated, part-time employees to bring pay down? Your chart links to an actual explanation: "In 2008, only 14 percent of federal workers were on part-time schedules, compared to 26 percent in the private sector. Federal workers were far older on average: 55 percent were between the ages of 45 and 64, compared to 36 percent of private-sector workers. Furthermore, 45 percent of federal workers held a college degree or higher educational credential, compared to 29 percent of private-sector workers. Federal workers are more likely to receive employer-paid health benefits than private sector workers — 77 percent compared to 56 percent." ... "The biggest difference between private and federal employment, illustrated in the graph above, lies in the proportion of jobs paying less than $25,000 a year. In 2008 more than 43 percent of private-sector workers earned less than $25,000 a year. Most federal employees fell squarely in the middle earnings brackets, making $25,000 to $75,000 a year."
- anamax 17y ago
  > Do you think people should receive necessary medical treatment based on ability to pay? Do you think that someone who has paid (via taxes) for other people's medical care should be denied govt-funded medical care? That's the reality of govt systems. Which reminds me, what's "necessary"? Seriously. Does it include pacemakers for 95 year olds? How about yearly mamograms for 40 year-old women? There will be govt "death panels" in the US, just like there are in every other "national health system". That's why the bill has 2k pages.
jbooth 17y ago
If you're ideologically opposed to the existence of any social welfare systems, then that's a philosophically consistent position -- one that about 80% of americans disagree with, but it's consist and you're entitled to your own opinions. You are not, however, entitled to your own facts. FACT: Medicare's payout rates have nothing to do with their administrative costs. You're thinking balance sheet. Administrative costs for Medicare and the VA are far, far lower than any insurance company. It's a fact. And that's before you consider that the insurance companies are taking out profits on top of that. This isn't an indictment of the ideas of markets in general -- this is more a statement that insurance companies aren't in anything resembling 'markets' and have no accountability to anyone. Who else gets away with 15-20% yearly rate hikes for a decade? They're getting less efficient. Similar story for SS. Per dollar managed, they're orders of magnitude lower in fees than any organization on the planet, because they process a ton of money through a dead-simple operation. Any inherent differences between "public and private" are noise compared to those fundamentals. It's not about public and private. If you want, you can argue that they should be doing more complicated things instead.. but then I think about my parents' impending retirement, their 401k recently, and am pretty glad that they kept it simple. So anyways -- you're entitled to your own philosophical opinions about whether things like medicare and SS should exist -- but factually, they're much more efficient at what they do than any private sector equivalent. Also, what they do would most likely never be done by the private sector on it's own. If you think it just shouldn't be done, that's a coherent position of course.

kalvin 17y ago

- Do you think people should receive necessary medical treatment based on ability to pay? That's the alternative universe where health insurance companies charge based on cost. - Should the government should try to hire younger, less educated, part-time employees to bring pay down? Your chart links to an actual explanation: "In 2008, only 14 percent of federal workers were on part-time schedules, compared to 26 percent in the private sector. Federal workers were far older on average: 55 percent were between the ages of 45 and 64, compared to 36 percent of private-sector workers. Furthermore, 45 percent of federal workers held a college degree or higher educational credential, compared to 29 percent of private-sector workers. Federal workers are more likely to receive employer-paid health benefits than private sector workers — 77 percent compared to 56 percent." ... "The biggest difference between private and federal employment, illustrated in the graph above, lies in the proportion of jobs paying less than $25,000 a year. In 2008 more than 43 percent of private-sector workers earned less than $25,000 a year. Most federal employees fell squarely in the middle earnings brackets, making $25,000 to $75,000 a year."

anamax 17y ago
> Do you think people should receive necessary medical treatment based on ability to pay? Do you think that someone who has paid (via taxes) for other people's medical care should be denied govt-funded medical care? That's the reality of govt systems. Which reminds me, what's "necessary"? Seriously. Does it include pacemakers for 95 year olds? How about yearly mamograms for 40 year-old women? There will be govt "death panels" in the US, just like there are in every other "national health system". That's why the bill has 2k pages.

jbooth 17y ago

If you're ideologically opposed to the existence of any social welfare systems, then that's a philosophically consistent position -- one that about 80% of americans disagree with, but it's consist and you're entitled to your own opinions. You are not, however, entitled to your own facts. FACT: Medicare's payout rates have nothing to do with their administrative costs. You're thinking balance sheet. Administrative costs for Medicare and the VA are far, far lower than any insurance company. It's a fact. And that's before you consider that the insurance companies are taking out profits on top of that. This isn't an indictment of the ideas of markets in general -- this is more a statement that insurance companies aren't in anything resembling 'markets' and have no accountability to anyone. Who else gets away with 15-20% yearly rate hikes for a decade? They're getting less efficient. Similar story for SS. Per dollar managed, they're orders of magnitude lower in fees than any organization on the planet, because they process a ton of money through a dead-simple operation. Any inherent differences between "public and private" are noise compared to those fundamentals. It's not about public and private. If you want, you can argue that they should be doing more complicated things instead.. but then I think about my parents' impending retirement, their 401k recently, and am pretty glad that they kept it simple. So anyways -- you're entitled to your own philosophical opinions about whether things like medicare and SS should exist -- but factually, they're much more efficient at what they do than any private sector equivalent. Also, what they do would most likely never be done by the private sector on it's own. If you think it just shouldn't be done, that's a coherent position of course.