This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 21st, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The problem with your health care is that you are not the customer.

That's the case for more than 100 million consumers of American health care,

according to David Goldhill.

Goldhill's father died of a hospital acquired infection.

Goldhill was the sent on a two-year journey to discover why markets

functioned so poorly in America's health care sector. He published his

discoveries in the September 2009 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, we spoke October 1st.

Information technology is frequently offered as the thing that's going to ring out a bunch of savings in the health care system and a point you

made at the forum is that given the way the health care system is structured right now, you could give information

technology, make a government investment in information technology, and probably still wouldn't

be used.

Well, I think a lot of people who talk about information technology and health care are not as familiar with how it works outside of health care.

The reason my local sushi bar gave its waiters hand-held ordering devices was not because of the National Sashimi Act passed by Congress.

That act didn't pass. It's because they want to get the orders right and quickly.

They capture some of that benefit, and by the way the customer captures some of the benefit, right, of that fairly simple thing.

The lack of information technology investment in health care is not the problem.

It's a symptom.

Throughout the entire rest of our economy, no matter how prosaic, how simple the business, or how complex

the business, information technology has revolutionized service, quality, and cost.

The fact that in health care, you can have things such as a RAND study that says,

...