I am not trying to pick an argument with you, in fact, I am not saying anything that the United States Government isn't saying. I don't make up these statistics, I am just saying what the statistics are and I gave the source of the statistics.
an unfortunate side effect of this forum is that even when not intending to be confrontational most posts come off that way anyway.
what i'm interested in for the moment is what percentage of heavy spenders spending mix is between .gov coverage and private coverage is.
reading through some of the stuff linked from AHRQ
http://www.meps.ahrq.gov/mepsweb/data_files/publications/st73/stat73.pdf
i'm writing notes as i come across stuff
while those age 65 and over
accounted for just under half (43 percent) of the top 5 percent of the
distribution, but only 4 percent of the bottom 50 percent.
so the heavy spending old people are a large portion, but not majority, of the big spenders. for the second half of that, i'm not sure what they're saying. is 4% of the bottom 50% 4 percentage points (so 4% of the population) or (0.04)(0.50)=(0.02)?
figure 3 is very close to what i want. the over 65 bottom 50% of the population is basically negligible because it's only 4%, so we can almost ignore it. though, it does provide an interesting contrast because a higher % of people who are in the top 5% also have private insurance than those in the bottom 50%. that is probably the same issue 20something have with health insurance, they feel healthy and so they don't tend to purchase as much as someone who doesn't.
a majority of big spenders over 65 have both private and public coverage. medicare gap coverage? pension or retiree coverage? a supermajority of big spenders under 65 have private coverage, but that it doesn't say who has private only and who has both private and public (medicaid).
figure 4 shows out of pocket expenditures, which would also be necessary. i'd consider those to be private expenses and to be lumped on top of insured expenses.
all food for thought, but i don't think it answers my ultimate question. :hmm: time to keep reading.
As far as fraud being part of overhead, you are absolutely correct, it is part of overhead. But fraud is not confined to government, you see it all the time on Wall Street, in big business, in insurance companies, and pretty everyplace else. You need only pick up a newspaper on any given day to confirm that. Hardly a day goes by without some scandal being discovered. Fraud seems to be running rampant in America, and it would be nice if we could put an end to the fraud, in ALL areas, not just government.
oh, i'm not at all saying that fraud only affects government, i'm just roundabout getting at the fact that fraud isn't considered an overhead cost by people such as congressman weiner. obviously, if medicare spending is $520ish billion, and there's $60 billion in fraud, total medicare overhead can't possibly be in the single percents.
One of the primary reasons that it costs so much to cover a few is the cost of administration due to providers having to staff enough people that they have expertise in filling out the forms in the 50 different manners that private insurers instruct them to be completed in and then to refile after they auto-reject a good portion of those.
so... tell the insurance companies to get together and come up with 1 form that they all use?