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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (7370)	7/6/2009 8:53:28 PM
From: i-node	Respond to of 42652

There are plenty of good arguments against this silly notion of low Medicare overhead without reaching for crooked straws. It is reaching for a crooked straw to suggest that administrative efficiency is adequately measured by a simple percentage of benefit payout. Medicare's claims processing costs in '05 were $800 million. A near-trivial amount of money, when compared with total administrative costs of $20 Billion. The point being that these costs just aren't that sensitive to the raw number of claims processed. They are the cost of having beneficiaries. The fact is that Medicare spends more money to manage a single beneficiary than private insurance companies, and in some years that difference is substantial. There are numerous factors that have to be taken into account, agreed, but that is no reason to ignore legitimate, highly relevant analysis.

To: Lane3 who wrote (7370)	7/6/2009 9:00:46 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

>> Of for Army procurement. Admin cost per case or per client makes no sense as a metric nor does admin cost per piece of equipment purchased. One of the requirements for using a "cost per case" or "cost per client" metric is that there be a meaningful consistency from one to the next. I doubt one can say that about most law offices; i.e., a big case has a lot more administrative cost than fighting a speeding ticket. So, it really doesn't make sense in that context. But in the case of an insurance company with a large number of insureds, I would think the overhead cost per insured is a pretty meaningful thing. These are the basic concepts behind all cost accounting, really.