woodguru

I have used the model of military hospitals and the way they operate as an example of why no for profit hospital can touch the government model. The same thing holds true with every for profit, or privatized entity such as prisons. Profit is the k**ler, no private company doesn't want to make profit for it's investors. No board of directors wants to work for reasonable amounts of salary. Bonuses are the rule for profit margin performance, which can be best hit by spending less money doing the job at hand.

Prisons owned by corporations cost staggering amounts of money compared to what a federally operated prison costs. Guards cost what, $60,000+/- each? My guess is private prisons pay less than the average of federal employees. Even county and state prisons charge the federal government for subsidies to run prisons. Costs are inflated and represented to be higher than they really are, and these costs to run a state or county prison then become the model that is used to figure out a cost per prisoner that the government pays these private prisons. Or the cost deemed necessary to incarcerate a prisoner becomes what the county facilities want for their prisoners.

Most privatized corporations servicing what should be a government run entity have staggeringly high profit margins, they do not come anywhere close to the 30% threshold needed by a business to run. Corporations can pay huge salaries to boards of directors and consultants, and those are expenses that figure in as operating costs that government entities do not have.

That vilified government entity known as entitlements such as social security, medicare, medicaid? They all operate with administration costs somewhere around 11%. You will not be able to find a hospital or healthcare insurance company that operates with administration costs much under 50%. It's because of administrators that make hundreds of thousands to millions more a year than their government equivalents make. The government has no need for ludicrously priced consultants such as a hospital's board of directors where the chairman is a surgeon who makes a couple of million a year.

No private for profit hospital can operate at as low a cost as a government hospital staffed with government paid employees.

Privatizing social security, what could go wrong with that? Funds handled by fund managers and being in the stock market would mean there would be nothing left in a repeat of 2007/2008. The government operates far more cost effectively than any private sector, and the idea that the government run as a business makes sense is ridiculous, unless of course you want to implement the audit and accountability any normal corporation would, something that government seems to have a phobia about.

Manning345 Loc: Richmond, Virginia

The view of government operations, personnel performance and salary that I have experienced is highly biased by some really bad occurrences. In the operations I witnessed, it was quite normal for the workload to be performed by 2 out of 10 employees, with the rest looking on and making comments. A 400 person operation was being carried by just 80 people. They all seemed to receive salary boosts and glowing reports of their contributions as well.

If you organize a new government entity, you will be offered a gaggle of employees to help from other government entities. The problem is, that is how those entities offload their deadwood, since firing is so hard to do. So, for the first year or so you are drowning in incompetent people, making the effective ratio 1 out of 10 or worse. (The private organization I worked for could and did fire people forthwith for good cause and escort them out immediately.)

On several occasions, I had to find some employee that ranked fairly high, and found them in a nice office with good furniture, but isolated rather far from everyone else, and obviously not pulling their weight, but they still had some nominal function to perform that required them to be briefed and for them to sign off on the briefing. (Whether or not they signed off was of no concern to the few that were carrying the load, and these isolated employees were very glad most of the time to just sign where indicated to get rid of the problem as quickly as possible.)

This was no way to run anything. The overhead was a k**ler.