Medicare and Medicaid operate at far greater efficiency than the private insurance market. The reason they're "In trouble" is because they can't keep up with the rising costs, and people are living 20 or so years longer than they did in the past.
The poor post office just makes an easy target. It's a service, partially subsidized by customer contributions. It doesn't have to make a profit; Few government programs do. People want their mail, and people don't want the price to go up. Show me someone else who an deliver a letter from California to New Jersey in a few days for 44 cents.
You're entitled to your opinion, but I disagree. If we can get back to ECO101, the reason the prices are so high is that providers are pricing their services @ market clearing level, and due to staggering redundancies inherent in the system, and as I said before, we are all subsidizing the uninsured in a ridiculously expensive way. I think the current proposal would do wonders to reign in costs. Add a public option, even more. Single payer, more still. But hey, that's just me.
I'll agree that a hands-off approach would also reduce costs, but in order for it to work, you would have to deny care to non-payers, period.
This is me, searching high and low in this post for any kind of evidence or substantiation of your statement that Medicare and Medicaid are more efficient than private insurance OR your statement that their only problem is that costs are rising too fast for them. Funny how I'm not finding it.
You're not looking very hard then.
Medicades admin costs are 4% of overall costs.
Priavte insurance returns about 75% of their premiums to their patients.
Heritage Foundation tried to attack that by saying the the PER PATIENT costs are lower, but their reasoning is flawed because they do not take into account that medicade and medicare patients tend to already BE SICK BEOFRE they go on those plans.
Now if you compare those who actually USE either their private or public plans, you see that the public plans are wildly more efficient than the pribvate plans.
heritage foundation is really good at spinning what appears to the unwashed to be a serious economic argument.
That's because they're basically apologists for a system that is a proven failure.
