Re:The Big Zero
by jbooth on Tuesday December 29, 2009 @08:11PM
(#1021699)
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.
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.