Medicare only has 4,400 employees.
4,400 versus 440,000+ employeesfor Wall Street health insurance companies. 440,000 parasitical jobs. Not to mention the overhead Doctors have to pay to hire staff to do their paperwork.
Economist Paul Krugman and many others have suggested that the health insurance industry has a lot to do with the excessive cost of U.S. health care. As Krugman describes the industry, an important part of its business model is collecting premiums while denying deserving claims and seeking out reasons to exclude patients from coverage they need. It takes a lot of extra employees to do this socially questionable work, and the industry's employment has grown like a weed over the past 10 years.
Are these 440,000 jobs we could do without? Oh yeah. We could use them in nursing and medical support, where they actually might contribute something useful to society.
Medicare serves 92,000,000 beneficiaries with 4,400 employees.
Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Anthem WellPoint & Co - 440,000 employees.
For fits and giggles, let's just say the Wall Streeters have 200 million beneficiaries. Let's apply that to Medicare employees and double them to 8,800. Still a far cry from the Wall Street insurers.
Wall Street Banks and Funds hold these percentages of shares in Health Insurance Cos.:
United 86.03%
WellPoint 89.03%
Aetna 91.80%
CIGNA Corp. 84.91%
Coventry Health 92.87%
Health Net Inc. 100.59% ???
Humana 88.88%
And Medicare doesn't invest billions of dollars in mortgage backed securities and commercial loans. I wonder how many people will prematurely die or be disabled because CIGNA/Wall Street invested $3.6 billion in commercial loans?
The same peons who brought you AIG, Lehman Bros, and Credit Default Swaps are in charge of your health care.
AMERIGROUP - HMO(aka the No-Op Co-Op) for MEDICAID and SCHIP Recipients
AMERIGROUP Corporation operates as a multistate managed healthcare company focused on serving people, who receive healthcare benefits through publicly sponsored programs, such as Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Medicaid expansion programs, and Medicare Advantage.
There is significant interest in AGP by institutional investors. The 108.38% of outstanding shares they control represents a greater percentage of ownership than at any other company in the Managed Health Care industry..
Amerigroupon Tuesday said it will enter a $225 million settlement agreement with Illinois and the federal government over allegations that it denied coverage to eligible pregnant women, the Baltimore Sun reports (Baltimore Sun, 7/23/2008).
Stay classy, Wall Street.