Banks, Insurers, and PMCs receive hundreds of billions in subsidies to cover their lack of efficiency relative to the government doing the same task

Think About This:

1. Banks receive subsidies to the tune of about 80 Billion dollars per year to make student loans.

2. Private Health Insurers receive 50 Billion in Medicare/Medicaid subsidies as extra money beyond how much it would cost the government to provide the same coverage.

3. Private Military Contractors (PMCs, or mercenaries) are paid much more per person than a soldier to do the same job. They each usually make more money even than David Petraeus when he was running the entire war.

What do these cases have in common? In each case, in the pursuit to transfer as much of what might be a public good as possible over to the private sector, in the rush to idolize the market and kill off the government, 50-100 Billion dollars per year has to be paid to private companies to do the same thing the government could do itself without paying all or most of that money. So what does it say that Banks, Insurers, and Military Contractors all require such massive infusions of billions of taxpayer dollars on a constant IV drip, all in order to do the same thing that the government could do (lend to students, pay doctors, fight a war) for much less? It says that A) there is such a thing as market power and B) there is such a thing as economies of scale and C) Government doesn't pay bloated executive salaries. Therefore, among many other reasons, government is more efficient than the private sector in the delivery of these public goods, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars wasted per year, in checks written to banks, insurers, PMCs, private prison companies like the GEO group, charter schools, and on and on in a failed pursuit of ideological purity, despite this being the perpetration of an ongoing fiscal disaster.

Health Care Key Points

Please see my key points on Health Care, concise and with references, at:

http://salsa.missioncollege.org/files/moglen/HealthCareKeys1.doc