Two of those three works cited to arrive at the "~70%" figure are ~thirty years old. It's not looking good for the author. Let's look at the paper by Edwards that's only ~9 years old...
Edwards's first citation for his "~70%" figure is one of those two thirty-year old studies. His second is one is a paper by Tanner from 1996. So, let's look at that one...
Sadly, the Tanner work is a dead-tree book, page 136 isn't available in the Google Books preview, and Mr. Edwards doesn't bother to mention the source of Tanner's numbers.
So. Two out of three sources for that "Government welfare programs spend 70% of every dollar on overhead" claim are ~thirty years old. One of those sources can't be easily verified. It's not looking good for the basis of that claim.
But, let's be charitable. Let's presume that the claims of the twenty-year-old paper were based on then-recent information that was correctly interpreted and is still valid, twenty years later... [0]
Remember that Tanner is talking about all US government welfare programs. We're talking -specifically- about Medicare. As mentioned here [2] the worst case overhead for Medicare is 8%. That's a far cry from the 75% figure cited by MCRed, and far better than the 25%->35% overhead figure cited by Mr. Edwards for private-sector charities.
Medicare is really well run and gives really good outcomes per dollar spent. It's a shining example of a long-standing, effective, well-run government program. Sure, if you look, you can find horror stories of bureaucratic failures and mismanagement... but the same is very true (and happens far more frequently) when dealing with private sector "health insurance" companies.
[0] Some reasonable contemporary scholars found much to complain about in the work. A choice quote from one criticism in 1997: "Tanner uses the familiar tactic of dividing this spending by the number of poor people ... [t]he intended inference is either that a lot of the money goes inappropriately to people who are not poor or that the bureaucracy siphons off most of the funds. Neither is correct. Most of the resources do go to the intended beneficiaries, but are not counted; about 80 percent of welfare spending takes the form of in-kind transfers, and poverty is defined in terms of cash incomes only. Administrative costs of most government welfare programs are under 12 percent." [1]
Edwards's first citation for his "~70%" figure is one of those two thirty-year old studies. His second is one is a paper by Tanner from 1996. So, let's look at that one...
Sadly, the Tanner work is a dead-tree book, page 136 isn't available in the Google Books preview, and Mr. Edwards doesn't bother to mention the source of Tanner's numbers.
So. Two out of three sources for that "Government welfare programs spend 70% of every dollar on overhead" claim are ~thirty years old. One of those sources can't be easily verified. It's not looking good for the basis of that claim.
But, let's be charitable. Let's presume that the claims of the twenty-year-old paper were based on then-recent information that was correctly interpreted and is still valid, twenty years later... [0]
Remember that Tanner is talking about all US government welfare programs. We're talking -specifically- about Medicare. As mentioned here [2] the worst case overhead for Medicare is 8%. That's a far cry from the 75% figure cited by MCRed, and far better than the 25%->35% overhead figure cited by Mr. Edwards for private-sector charities.
Medicare is really well run and gives really good outcomes per dollar spent. It's a shining example of a long-standing, effective, well-run government program. Sure, if you look, you can find horror stories of bureaucratic failures and mismanagement... but the same is very true (and happens far more frequently) when dealing with private sector "health insurance" companies.
[0] Some reasonable contemporary scholars found much to complain about in the work. A choice quote from one criticism in 1997: "Tanner uses the familiar tactic of dividing this spending by the number of poor people ... [t]he intended inference is either that a lot of the money goes inappropriately to people who are not poor or that the bureaucracy siphons off most of the funds. Neither is correct. Most of the resources do go to the intended beneficiaries, but are not counted; about 80 percent of welfare spending takes the form of in-kind transfers, and poverty is defined in terms of cash incomes only. Administrative costs of most government welfare programs are under 12 percent." [1]
[1] http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=42...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10840804