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Hey listeners, it's on Z-Smith Rogers. It's open enrollment season for health insurance,

and the headlines are telling us that many

premiums are going up significantly. Stephanie Desmond talks to Johns Hopkins health policy expert,

Jerry Anderson, about why this is happening, what the future holds, and what it has to do with

the U.S. government shutdown. Let's listen. Jerry Anderson, thanks so much for joining me.

It's always a pleasure.

I keep seeing news about health insurance rates going up.

It feels like this is a confluence of events that's getting us higher and higher rates right now.

And I'm curious, what is going on?

So the first thing I've got to start with is I've been a failure for the past 45 years.

I came to Washington in 1978 to control health care prices.

I was in charge of President Carter's hospital cost containment legislation,

stayed on for the Reagan administration and brought you Medicare prospective payments, which is essentially

how the Medicare program operates today in setting hospital rates. And all these things made a lot of

sense, but we haven't been able to actually control health care spending. We've taken a look at

why. And really, it's prices, not quantity.

It's not that you and I are getting more services. We're not going to the hospital more. We're

not going to the doctor more. In most cases, we're not getting more pharmaceuticals. Those are the

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