The one thing that I know to be true, Marc...is that if you want something to cost three times as much and take twice as long to get done...you let the government do it.
It's not that I trust businesses unquestionably...it's that I KNOW that government is inept.
Bullshit. Don't mistake a government with poor leadership for ineptness. In spite of the rumors, most federal programs with a direct impact are run efficiently.
Medicare is one of the largest health insurers and they run at 95% to 98% efficiency, depending on whose numbers you look at. Meaning that the overhead to administer the Medicare insurance program is 3% to 5% and 95 to 98 cents out of every dollar in premiums and taxes collected is paid out in benefits.
The BEST run private health insurers run between 75% and 80% efficiency. Meaning 20 to 25 cents of your premium dollar goes to overhead and only 75 to 80 cents is available to pay claims.
What you call "efficiency" is actually them refusing to pay the whole bill
How are those costs passed on?
If every widget I made I got to pass 95 percent of the cost off to someone else
well yeah, it would look pretty good too
By 2049, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will consume all tax revenues. Medicare spending is adding to future deficits faster than any other spending.
What you're talking about are valid points but have nothing to do with how efficiently the bureaucracy is managed.
The fact is that only 75 to 80 cents of our 'health care dollars' paid in trust to our private health insurance bureaucracies goes toward paying claims and the government runs their bureaucracy at an efficiency of 95 to 98 cents per dollar collected benefiting the customers DIRECTLY. It's not rocket science.
One can claim that the private insurer bureaucracies are worth the difference (I would disagree), but one can not say the government is inefficient when compared to private bureaucracies doing exactly the same service. The numbers don't support the thesis.