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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (577395)	7/22/2010 2:11:42 PM
From: SilentZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575623

>Z, you haven't acknowledged the subcontractors who are under obligation to employ thousands of Medicare bureaucrats. Those are care providers. Those "Medicare bureaucrats" are their employees. Not sure what your problem there is. >Let me put it this way. How big is the health insurance industry today? You think you can replace all of that with just a few thousand bureaucrats? If so, you would be wrong. It works with Medicare. And we're probably talking between 50,000-100,000 "bureaucrats," as you derisively call them. Remember, you've got lot of administrative structure already in place... government insurance doesn't need much in the way of marketing, or variety of plans, etc... there's a lot of staffing that wouldn't be necessary. But even if it needed 500,000 new federal employees, that still wouldn't be a major increase in the size of the federal government. -Z

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (577395)	7/22/2010 2:30:47 PM
From: i-node	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575623

>> Z, you haven't acknowledged the subcontractors who are under obligation to employ thousands of Medicare bureaucrats. He'll never get this. To claim that adding 500,000 employees to the government to administer health care isn't a big deal. That's just very close to being insane if you think about it. That would be a 25% increase in federal payroll. There are two other points he's missing -- a) The fiscal intermediaries who actually have the employees are -- you guessed it -- EVIL INSURANCE COMPANIES. So, Medicare in Tennessee? You call Cigna. In Arkansas or Louisiana, you call Arkansas BCBS. Why? Because they can run the operation cheaper than Medicare can do it, and everyone knows it. b) Who runs state Medicaids? Most of the states actually farm this out companies like Hewlett Packard (formerly, EDS). Why? Because it costs less. In my state, HP runs the entire operation with almost no government people involved. Unfortunately, when you hire these giant companies to do government work, what happens? They start acting like government organizations. I've seen Ark BCBS EDI services change over the years from being a tightly run, efficient organization with three people in it to a bureaucrat filled, do nothing, helpless money pit. I say turn it all over the WALMART. Then we'll get some shit done.