Quote:
Originally Posted by Botnst
Overhead in most fed agencies charged to other fed agencies is between 30% and 51%.
It is really impressive that fed healthcare outperforms all others. My suspicion is that they don't do full cost account. Be interesting to know for sure.
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I'm sure it depends on how you calculate the numbers. It has been awhile since I've read a study or analysis of government administrative costs, but previous numbers that I've seen run in the 1-2% range. I've read that Canada's system runs around the 3% range.
I briefly skimmed this position paper from CAHI (the association of health insurers), which obviously argues that Medicare admin costs are underreported. I take some issues with their methodology for "adjusting" the true administration costs of Medicare (e.g. they include portions of congressional salaries spent working on Medicare policy, and judicial costs of dealing with Medicare fraud). Still, even by their numbers the "adjusted" rate for Medicare administration runs at 5.2%. By comparison, the non-profit related admistrative costs for private health insurance runs at 8.9%, with profit it runs 16.7%.
http://www.cahi.org/cahi_contents/resources/pdf/CAHI_Medicare_Admin_Final_Publication.pdf