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Monday, July 23, 2007
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Administrative Savings

One of the things that liberals generally argue when they push for socialized medicine is that it will magically generate all this extra money in "Administrative Savings".  I wonder if these are the types of savings they are thinking about:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture distributed $1.1 billion over seven years to the estates or companies of deceased farmers and routinely failed to conduct reviews required to ensure that the payments were properly made, according to a government report.

In a selection of 181 cases from 1999 to 2005, the Government Accountability Office found that officials approved payments without any review 40 percent of the time...

In a letter responding to the GAO report, the Agriculture Department said that the payments were not necessarily examples of fraud or abuse and that auditors did not prove any specific cases of cheating. The department's field offices defended the practice of routinely paying dead farmers' estates without fully investigating the claims, citing staff shortages and competing priorities. The agency also said that any overpayments would amount to less than 1 percent of farm subsidies paid between 1999 and 2005.

To the liberals who I know read my blog, but hardly ever admit it... be honest with me.  Name one existing efficient government program.  I'll give you even more credit if you can name an efficient program that is so large as to cover an entire state, or even better, the nation.  Using garbage collection as an example hardly seems fair.  And if you can't name one that can... why do you think that health insurance will magically become the first?

Via The Volokh Conspiracy.

# Posted at 11:27 AM by Nick  |  Comment Feed Link 3 Comments  |  No Trackbacks

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Monday, July 23, 2007 2:05:16 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
"Using garbage collection as an example hardly seems fair"

Trash collection is privatized by my city.
Monday, July 23, 2007 3:10:19 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
The entire port system is amazingly efficient when compared to others in the world and operates with a surprisingly small level of graft. Our air travel system is one of the safest and most efficient in the world and would be even better if it hadn't been gutted during the Reagan years.

Our system for collecting child support has been efficient in the past but there are those who would see it cut.

Up until the Bush administration our FDA and USDA ran one of the most efficient food safety systems in the world.

I think that one of the keys is that good government can be delivered by a system which believes that good government is possible. Once you begin to believe that government is bad you start to receive bad government. Pointing to the Bush Administration's Ag Department as some sort of example of what all Ag Departments must be is cynicism at best. That would be like saying that Alberto Gonzalez is running a Department of Justice of which we should be proud.
grumps
Monday, July 23, 2007 4:02:26 PM (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)
Our system for collecting child support has been efficient in the past but there are those who would see it cut.

I don't know about cutting it, but I'd like to see Federal mail fraud charges in the cases where they collect child support from men who are proven by DNA testing not to be the fathers.
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