Armed Guards? Really?

Yesterday, I went to the Baltimore headquarters of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS, for short). For those who do not know, Medicare is the government-run health insurance plan for the aged and disabled, and Medicaid is the government-run health-insurance safety net for the poor.

The ONLY activity that CMS does is pushing paper to coordinate benefits and policies for the millions of Americans who receive healthcare administered via Medicare and Medicaid. There are no dangerous vaccines tested (as at NIH), nor is there tremendously-valuable intellectual property held there (as with FDA).

You can imagine one's surprise, then, to be faced with armed guards just to enter the parking lot of the headquarters. Armed guards that insist you step out of your vehicle, open your glovebox, open the hood of your car, and generally give a decent impression of what it will be like to enter an El Al airline unannounced.

For the life of me, I cannot comprehend the need for armed sentries there. A friend mentioned that having data for millions of patients represents a potential privacy breach, which may warrant the armed guards. If so, with that logic, shouldn't doctors' offices, hospitals, and insurance companies have similar security measures? It's not as if the government has a monopoly on consideration for privacy. (Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact, as shown by this incident, this incident, and this incident -- which compromised the privacy of 26.5 million veterans and military personnel.)

I see one of the major flaws of the State -- the lack of a need for cost-benefit analysis -- as a prime reason behind this sheer waste of taxpayer funds. The beauty of the free market's profit incentive is that is leads to rational use of scarce resources: had CMS been a private-sector organization, the executives would balance the value of security worthy of a war-torn country with competing needs. (For example, better health-insurance or retirement benefits for employees, providing a subsidized cafeteria, in-house day care, to name but a few.)

But, with the government -- especially the federal government, which is under no obligation to balance its budget -- there is, really, no such concept as "scarce resources." And, with the 9/11-fostered fear of terrorism, any demand for increased security is met by government officials falling over themselves to demonstrate how committed they are to keeping America safe. (And, most especially, keeping government property and employees even safer than "regular" America.)

And that's what leads to the headquarters of the federal government's health insurance programs being "protected" by taxpayer-funded armed guards.