Nor is this the only example. Private health insurance companies are much less efficient than the government-run Medicare program.58 Private life insurance companies are much less efficient than the government’s Social Security program.59 To take another example: a recent study showed that, on average, contractors “charged the federal government more than twice the amount it pays federal workers” for performing comparable services.60 As much as one out of four dollars spent on contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan was wasted or misspent, according to the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq
