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A comment on TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free. Parent comment

Re:TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Ta... by toomuchtodo on Thursday October 17, 2019 @04:11PM (#21285911)
This is a strawman argument. Being "government run" does not automatically equate to being irresponsible or inefficient. Your complaint holds no water: Social Security and Medicare are incredibly efficient programs for their scale, and both wildly popular with their participants (per Pew Research as well as direct survey data from SSA and HHS). If they can achieve such results, why would other large orgs such as the IRS not? Rhetorical of course! They can, with proper political and logistical support (as has been seen with USDS/18F executing at the IRS, DHS, and VA).
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Re:TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Ta... by formercoder on Friday October 18, 2019 @10:15AM (#21291535)
I don’t know about social security but the claim that Medicare is more efficient than private insurers is not correct. It only appears to be so due to accounting procedures that do not expense services from other govt agencies on Medicare’s pnl. So for example, a different department of the government handles billing, all the costs therein are not included in Medicare’s bottom line, thus inflating its efficiency.
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Re:TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Ta... by toomuchtodo on Friday October 18, 2019 @10:34AM (#21291710)
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/sep... (Comparing administrative costs for private insurance and Medicare)

Medicare is still more efficient than private insurance, even allowing for Social Security handling a lot of the administration you mention. Social Security must exist, and must provide the services it does, so you would of course rely on their infra if you're Medicare.

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Re:TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Ta... by formercoder on Friday October 18, 2019 @12:35PM (#21292773)
So the government is incredibly inefficient at everything... except health insurance?
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Re:TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Ta... by toomuchtodo on Friday October 18, 2019 @12:59PM (#21293004)
Those weren't my words at all.
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