This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What might happen if health care spending were just cut in half?

According to George Mason

University economist Robin Hanson, less than you might expect.

Hanson authored a recent essay at the Cato Institute's Cato Unbound

online magazine. There he points to evidence that down plays the role

that medical advances have played in our extended lifespans.

And also points to studies that show that widely varied health care

spending produces little variation in overall health.

We spend a lot on medicine, we spend about 16% of GDP on medicine, and when we look at geographic areas, some spend more and some spend less. We can also

look at different countries and we've also looked at individual habits of companies and even a randomized experiment.

And when we look at the variations and how much people spend and then try to compare that to

variations and how healthy people are.

We basically don't see anything.

That is, places and people and companies that spend more on medicine

don't seem to be any healthier because of it.

This is true when we control for lots of other effects that you might be concerned about,

like other people smoke and how rich they are and things

like that. And it also showed up in a randomized experiment where we randomly assigned some people

to have high prices and other people low prices. People with low prices took more but they weren't any

healthier. This is this is relatively widely accepted. I'm not saying

...