Quote Originally Posted by JaneV2.0 View Post
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.
“No rational argument will have a rational effect on a person who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.” -- Karl Popper (paraphrased)


In my experience, people who are virulently anti-government take a philosophical stance on it. Some of them don't even know that they participate (even voluntarily) in government programs. And I've yet to see a single person who has turned down government assistance; nor do I see much support for limiting government programs to only those who need them. Maybe they're out there, but I sure haven't met any in half a century on this planet. It's almost like government benefits transmogrify from "wasteful spending" to "my due" when they go to the right people. We just saw what happened when Mr. Corporate America tried to run for President. If government is so screwed up, why didn't he win?