This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 25th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Medicare is a massive government-run health care program, but how does its existence,

the system itself, impact the quality of the care it delivers?

Cato's Michael Cannon is co-author of a new white paper on the subject. We spoke last week.

When people think about health care and delivery and the programs that they make use of in order to receive health care services and products, I think people don't appreciate that they interact with one another.

That programs like Medicare or Medicaid have some impact on health care

delivered via other means.

So what, how do you think of the relationship

between specifically Medicare and private sector health care?

So the Medicare program has a big impact on the delivery of medical care both for seniors

and even for people outside of the Medicare program.

Researchers for a long time have been very worried about the impact that Medicare

has on health care delivery because this hasn't penetrated the public consciousness yet,

but researchers have been documenting for decades that Medicare has a negative impact on the quality of care.

And a couple of examples are in 1995, the Intermountain Healthcare System implemented some

new treatment guidelines that reduced pneumonia severity and even mortality from pneumonia.

And since the guidelines

however also reduce the number

and the complexity of admissions for pneumonia,

Medicare, because of the way it pays for these things actually paid Intermountain less

when it saved those lives than it would have if Intermountain had allowed more patients to die.

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