This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 20th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

The Congressional Budget Office says health care reforms pushed by Democrats in Congress

and President Obama will do very little to rein in costs. Michael Cannon, Director of Health Policy

Studies at the Cato Institute, says that's just the beginning of the problems.

What he basically told them is that the health care reforms that the Democrats are trying really to cram through Congress before the

August recess before anyone realizes what's in them is that is that those

reforms are really taking the St. Augustine approach to

cost containment, which is God give me cost containment, but not yet. What the

bills do is they spend a lot more money to cover the uninsured.

That's a goal of the Democrats.

That's a goal of President Obama.

But President Obama has also said that health care reform

really isn't worth doing unless you're containing costs,

slowing down the rate of growth in health care

spending so that it doesn't grow faster than the economy. Now I'm not sure that

that that should be a goal of health care reform. But given that that is Mr Obama's goal, it's very interesting that the

Democrats have put together a health care reform plan and that President Obama is trying

to sell a health care reform plan that

doesn't do that at all. And what Mr. Elmendorf was the director of the

nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Congress's number crunchers, who, they're really the referees in this debate.

What his statement did is it totally took the wind out of the administration's sales, at least in terms of trying to pass the bill that contains health care

costs because this does not contain health care costs this throws more fuel on the

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