This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 6, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Medicare is a gargantuan federal program and if it is to be saved as Democrats and Republicans both

claim they want reform is the only option. Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at

the Cato Institute, discussed Medicare at a recent Cato Institute

E- Briefing. This is an election season. If you might have noticed the

Disneyland in Tampa they're going on down there and I guess we've got another one in North Carolina coming up in a week or so.

And one of the primary issues from all the TV commercials and all the commentary is Medicare and the question of Medicare reform.

Now politicians being who they are and political campaigns being what they are, it is probably asking a little much to get too much

subtlety and too much depth in the discussion of an issue like Medicare reform.

But I would have hoped that we might have at least gotten a little bit of honesty

when it came to Medicare reform.

And so far from what we've seen in the campaign, we've seen a lot of pandering and not very much truth-telling.

So let's talk a little bit about what the various campaigns have been saying, and then

we can hear from you and some of your questions on this.

First of all I'd like to put Medicare reform into a little bit of context and the whole

question of why we need to reform Medicare. Last year, just last year alone, Medicare ran a

shortfall of about $200 billion.

That is, it spent about $200 billion more

on benefits than it took in in revenue.

Overall, if you want to look going forward, the most optimistic scenario for Medicare,

the one that the administration touts as being its best case scenario,

...