This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 26, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

The lament from the left may be that health care lacks coordination and integration, but does that failure to

coordinate care indicate a failure of markets or government?

Arnold Kling, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and co-author of a new Cato briefing paper says

the answer isn't immediately obvious. The point about government control

versus private sector is kind of comes in at the end of the paper because the

paper starts out by suggesting that we need a more integrated form of health care, which is a point that is made on the left, in fact more often on the right.

And then, so at the end, then we talk about how to get there.

So if we can start with sort of why to get there,

why do we need integrated health care?

I come at this from actually my own personal experience in business and

and with the health care system. And in back way back in 1994 I quit a decent well-paying job at Freddie Mac to start one of the first commercial websites.

And the main reason I did that was because I wanted autonomy.

I was tired of dealing with the bureaucracy in particular the information technology

bureaucracy which was always telling you that to do a simple change would take months and

months and millions of dollars and they were always talking about these

procedures of version control and

and life cycle development

and all these bureaucratic procedures

that to me made no sense. that so when I could start my

own website I could do anything I wanted. I could make six changes in an hour if I wanted. I could run

the whole system. Just a lone hacker could maintain a website in 1994, could do anything

...