This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 3rd,

24. I'm Caleb Brown.

For all the verbal attacks relating to health care reform, lobbed to and from the campaigns of. the much less coherent plan from either campaign for how best to make health care

affordable, universal, and transparent for Americans.

It is Michael Cannon explains.

When we talk about health care in the United States, it feels like we have to do a slight history

lesson. We already had a great number of government

interventions into the health care marketplace before the Affordable Care Act,

also known as Obamacare. And as you have pointed out many times, we don't really even have

Obamacare anymore because it has been altered, realtered authorities have changed in the few minutes we have here.

Can you just briefly describe what it is that we have?

We have had 100 years of government intervention after government intervention in health care.

No one is happy with it.

And so the solution is obviously more government intervention in health care.

In the United States, government plays such a dominant role

in the financing of health care that we are among the top OECD nations in terms of government control.

Government controls 85% of health spending in the United States.

That puts us just 5% percentage points behind Cuba.

Cuba, by the way, is a small communist country in the Caribbean,

where presumably the government controls everything about health care,

and in the United States, government... government controls almost as much of the health care

almost as much of the health care spending as it does in Cuba.

...