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Quote:

According to congressional assessments, a retired Army colonel with a family currently paying $460 a year for health care will pay $2,048.

Via OPM, one can find the health insurance rates for Federal Civilians or as the article calls them "unionized civilian defense workers" (really a union in name only). One can tally up the yearly rates for employees with a family.

I tallied up 17 fee-for-service and 13 HMO plans (in California), and will share results in (min, avg, max) form.

For the 17 fee-for-service plans it's ($2400, $3871, $7920).
For the 13 HMOs (in California) it's ($2232, $5843, $15012 -- California Health Net WTF!).
Excluding HealthNet of California its ($2232, $4284, $8184).

To "spin" the article in inflammatory terms we could say that the retired US Army colonel is paying 8-9x less for health care than the average Federal Employee (and its not rocket science to think that the non-Federal employee is paying 2x more for health care).

If anyone should be up in arms over the disparity of treatment, it should be the Federal Employees and their unions... actually it's more plausible that the unions have pointed out that the military pays significantly less than Federal employees.

... and of course everyone gets to blame Obama when these types of things are wholly within the realm of Congress... well yes, he did put this proposal out as a way to reduce the national deficit (and it's hilarious because our liabilities are something like $100T+' so when they claim to save $4T or $10T through some lame proposal like this it's really just peanuts...). Even if they came up with $20T in "savings" it would not be enough!

Full disclosure: I am a Federal Employee, but putting this information out there because I think the article is ridiculously slanted to make it seem like Federal Employees also pay such a low yearly premium for health insurance. It would be outrageous if the was the case.

2012-02-28 03:12:29


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