Reply #184: No, they are contracting out their health care because there are not [View All]

enough military doctors, nurses, corpsmen, administrative types available to man those services. Not only are there not as many billets available, everyone is being deployed. Also, BRAC has closed many medical facilities on bases.

Frankly, working as a DoD contractor and having run the numbers comparing cost of contractors compared to cost of enlisted and commissioned (as well as GS) employees, the government actually pays less to have their own people do the same work (due to duty rotations, no OT, internal training, licensing, and certification) than they do to have a contractor provide a service on a OEM or Cost and Materials contract. You also get consistent service, which is something most contractors can't provide, because after two/three years, the contract comes back up for bid and they have to come up with ways to cut costs to keep their contracts or risk losing them to potentially unscrupulous competitors such as Wilkes (just sent to prison for 60 years), KBR, or other more skeevy contract companies that are in it for max profits.

Yeah, my company can sometimes be skeevy for max profits and sometimes we do work that it would be cheaper for the government to do if they had the manpower, but we usually get slapped hard with fines when we do the nasty crap, and we certainly don't make enough of a profit to be considered more than in the "middle tier" at Wall Street of the large government contractors.

Majority of the DoD budget goes to contractors, not to the soldiers and sailors, or government employees. And that doesn't mean that it's done for "fiscally prudent" measures. Lotta Pork in that barrel.

Haele