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

The Smiles on Capitol Hill featuring President Obama and health care lobbyists appeared to have one purpose, getting health care

companies to voluntarily cut revenues, but Michael Cannon, director of health

policy studies at the Cato Institute, leaves the Kumbaya moment another purpose.

It gave government budgeters the impetus

to cook the books.

The big media event that President Obama

held with lobbyists for the health care industry certainly seemed to be a big deal.

You had six very powerful lobbying groups representing insurance companies, doctors, drug makers,

and so forth. Committing to reducing health care spending or the growth of health

care spending by 1.5 percentage points per year.

Now that doesn't sound like very much, but over the course of 10 years, that is $2 trillion worth of savings.

By strange coincidence, that's almost exactly as much as President Obama would need to pay for his plans for universal health

insurance coverage for all Americans. So it certainly seemed to be a big step on the

road toward universal health insurance coverage.

Well, after that big media event,

we learned that it wasn't quite the big deal

that the Obama administration had made it out to be.

Soon after that event, the members of those lobbying groups

began calling their Washington offices and saying, hey wait, did we really commit to

reduce the growth of our revenues that way and then the

lobbyists had to tell their members no actually that the president

...