Where's the Calvin and Hobbs thread?

How many military employees?

Private sector health insurance industry companies, as of 2007, had about 444,000 employees.

The federal government analogue--The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is the federal agency responsible for the administration of Medicare and Medicaid--has about 4,100 employees.

About 29% of policies and about 60-65% of spending--the 65+ crowd runs up a highly disproportionate share of medical bills for obvious reasons--are through Medicare or Medicaid.

Even if you completely discount Medicaid enrollees, where administration is shared with the states, and the 19% of medicare enrollees who are insured through Medicare advantage, it's pretty clear that the government, at least in this area, is much more efficient than private industry is when it comes to not employing a bunch of useless employees.

Those 444,000 are not useless. If they were they would be gone. Business is ruthless in getting rid of unnecessary workers.

And sometimes necessary ones, if it'll boost stock prices a little.

Unfortunately that is true in some cases.

One of the big problems in America is the inability to think more then short term.

Gee... I wonder how Medicare gets away with employing so few employees compared to those giant (and don't forget, EVIL!) health insurance companies?? Oh, wait...

You do realize that Medicare contracts out it's processing to those giant (and don't forget, EVIL!) health insurance companies, right? They're called Medicare Administrative Contractors/Government Benefit Administrators (MAC/GBA).

Guess who has those contracts? My information is about four years old, so the contracts may have shifted hands. But, Blue Cross & Blue Shield and CIGNA handled the claims for this Region depending on which service you actually required.

But, lets play along for a moment and assume that the 4,100 people you mentioned are the only people involved in CMS.

The GAO says Medicare pays approximately 4.5 million claims per day. Lets assume that all 4,100 employees are Claims Processors, something we know isn't the case. Lets also assume that we only make them work five days a week. That means that each person deals with 1,537 claims per day. Broken down over an 8-hour work day, that means each person approves one claim every 20 seconds. Considering the amount of documentation required for each of these claims, well, that's one hell of a workload isn't it?

Oh, and since we're here, straight from the GAO's mouth:

In summation, you're wrong. Dead. Damned. Wrong. The government merely shifts the burden, perhaps smartly so. Rather than hire the army of people necessary to administer the program, they just contract it out to organizations that are more than familiar with the type of work. So, that 4,100 employee figure is like so much else in our government...BULLSHIT!

Using the farmer's official government source. 2.0 million civilian employees + 1.5 million Active Military Personnel (I assume it's legit, it's an official .mil source) + 670,000 United States Postal Service employees (from a Congressional Research Service report) = 4.17 million Federal employees.

That's more than Wal-Mart, McDonald's, UPS, Sears, Home Depot, Target, IBM, General Motors, and General Electric, the top 9 private employers in the US, combined. Or, more than Wal-Mart, Deutsche Post, Siemens Group, McDonald's, Carrefour, Compass Group, and UPS, the top 7 private employers on the Planet, combined.

Bit of a strawman going on here.

OWS attacks American Cleptocracy.

Right defends Free Market.


Am I the only one seeing the disconnect?

The OWS would kill the Free Market in a heart beat because their version of killing American Cleptocracy is destroying the businesses. In other words they are willing to burn down the house to kill a few rats.