What you describe is more like a ponzi scheme, given SS now takes in less than it pays out.
Presidents are required by law to review SS and report to congress how things are going. Recall when Bush did that and suggested something needed to be done he was
excoriated by the left.
If you go back and read the late 1930's federal register entries , there are two interesting things that show up:
1. Original intent was to invest in interest bearing securities. It took congress less than a year to recognize the bonanza they'd created and change it to "pay as you go" spending the copious leftovers. You won't find that on SS's website in fact they deny it.
2. The administrators figured out by 1940 (dont ask me how) that around 2020 SS would cease to be a profit maker.
So SS is and has been a ponzi scheme for seventy plus years and TPTB cannot say "We never saw it coming".. This lays right at congress' doorstep.
...
You take those overhead figures as accurate, as in they are comparing like to like? Why?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/201...trative-costs/
Indeed i do.
Look at the last chart in the Forbes article.
It shows that Medicare delivered $8500 of treatment for $509, 5.8%,(2005)
while private delivered perhaps $3500 for $ 453, 13.2%.
It is somewhere between bad arithmetic and sophistry to claim 13% is more efficient than 6%.
By Mr Roy's logic, one should ship by trailer truck instead of rail because the fuel cost is spread out over many trucks instead of one locomotive.
Further Mr Roy's article in Forbes is a near bolt-for-bolt copy of this
Hertiage Foundation article two years earlier, whose author Roy mentioned (Robert Book)
http://www.heritage.org/research/re...e-higher-not-lower-than-for-private-insurance
observe the chart is identical and content is on same compass heading.
Note i did take your remark to heart and looked into it a little.
When i saw
Heritage Foundation my eyebrows raised, they have been dunning me to join ever since i wrote my senator blasting her for supporting Obamacare
as written(namely by the insurance lobby, Cigna to be specific, see PBS
Frontline episode "Obama's Deal".)
From Heritage Foundation's homepage:
Our mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.
I believe Heritage Foundation is probably as unbiased and unlikely to spin facts as Sean Hannity or Thom Hartmann.
But, Heritage's Mr Book in turn used this 2007 article for a reference:
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/mpr_05.htm
and among its conclusions:
For the private market, non-benefit costs are about 11-14 percent of total premiums, while the direct administrative costs reported for Medicare are about 3 percent of Medicare outlays. A reasonable allocation of a share of outlays for general government functions and for the administration of justice increase direct and indirect administrative—that is, non-benefit—outlays as reported in the federal budget to about 6 percent of Medicare outlays.
Interestingly that author
Benjamin Zycher
Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
estimates Medicare admin at 5-6% as do both subsequent authors.
He suggests that deregulation would be the way to go.
To me, deregulation means un-entwining the industry from government.
And that's the drum i am pounding.
old jim
). In my little town of 100k in TX we had more MRI than all of BC and we had more CT scanners than all of BC. Access was an issue for them, but not for us. Same day exams weren't generally a big deal.
