Quote Originally Posted by Iris lily View Post
That's a good way to put it, and yes, that's largely my distain for the feds, their overreach. And then to add insult to injury, their inability to run things well. Oh sure they can run things, but it is always expensive, complex, and sometimes sub-par.
From Dollars and Sense.org:

The United States' Social Security system is the most efficiently run insurance program in the world, with overhead of only 0.7% of annual benefits; for every $100 paid into the system, $99.30 is paid out in benefits to retirees.

From Health Affairs.org:

Medicare Has Lower Administrative Costs Than Private Plans.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, administrative costs in Medicare are only about 2 percent of operating expenditures. Defenders of the insurance industry estimate administrative costs as 17 percent of revenue.
Insurance industry-funded studies exclude private plans’ marketing costs and profits from their calculation of administrative costs. Even so, Medicare’s overhead is dramatically lower.
Medicare administrative cost figures include the collection of Medicare taxes, fraud and abuse controls, and building costs.

Medicare would be an even better bargain if it could negotiate drug prices like the VA can.

I'm all for streamlining and consolidating government programs--judiciously--but I don't agree that all federal programs are wasteful or poorly run.