This is a Kato's special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. The president's hope for

containing costs in the U.S. health care system are increasingly meeting with data that

show none of the leading plans for health care reform will in fact contain costs.

Michael Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies, at the Cato Institute, comments.

There are really two competing goals that the Democrats are talking about.

One is covering the uninsured, the other is

containing health care costs. If you want to know which of those two goals is more

important to them, look at what the legislation would actually do. And Douglas

Elmanorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, those are Congress's

nonpartisan budget number crunchers, he has said that yes this legislation will expand coverage, but as far as bending the cost curve, which is the

lingo for reducing health care costs, as far as bending the cost curve goes, yeah, it'll

bend the cost curve, but it bends it in the wrong

direction. It bends it toward higher costs, not lower costs. So even though we have a

lot of rhetoric from the president and Democrats in Congress about bending

the cost curve and containing health care costs, I don't think the legislation demonstrates

that that is not their goal for health care reform.

You said that the president conflates, spending, and costs.

What do you mean?

When people say health care costs,

they mean lots of different things.

Some people think health insurance premiums. I want them to be lower. Some people

think the aggregate amount of health care spending. Some people think out of pocket spending.

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