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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (92392)	10/29/2008 10:36:12 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 541482

Self insured? Taxpayer insured. The taxpayer is the employer, in this case of the Armed Services. Medical care is typically provided by employers. Not usually from the company store but in the form of a health insurance employee benefit. It would be hard, though, for the military to use Blue Cross. There aren't a lot of preferred providers in Iraq, after all. So it both self-insures and uses a company store approach. Self-insurance is apparently becoming more common with large employers. I just posted an article from today's Post that mentions the proliferation of self-insured companies in Minnesota. The reason I engaged this topic was that it's common for people to conflate government benefit programs and government employee benefits. There's a poster on SI who has ragged me regularly about federal employee health benefits. She doesn't get that, while federal employee health benefits are paid from tax moneys, they are paid in the government's capacity as employer. The role makes it conceptually different from a welfare program. So I was quick to note the same theme in your post. If the government were to offer its citizens the same health benefits as it does its military employees, that would be socialized medicine. But the current military employee health benefit program isn't.