This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 7th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown. Health savings accounts are meant to put people squarely in control of their own health care dollars.

A new proposal for so-called large HSAs would give consumers even more control over

health care spending. Michael Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, discusses the idea.

For decades, there really hasn't been that much difference between Republicans and Democrats

when it comes to health care. And we can see this most clearly in how Democrats took a Republican

proposal that we now call Obamacare and ran with it and enacted it. And Republicans now want to repeal Obamacare and that's a big difference

between Republicans and Democrats but most Republicans want to replace Obamacare with something that I call Obamacare Light,

a proposal for where the federal government offers health insurance tax credits to some or all Americans

that shares a lot of features with Obamacare.

Well, something has emerged now, legislation has been introduced in Congress

that actually takes a step in the opposite direction toward a market system

so that if you repealed Obamacare and put in place health insurance tax credits, you'd really be

moving in the same direction as Obamacare.

But this legislation, which would create what I call large health savings accounts,

actually moves in the opposite direction toward a market system.

And it does that by trying to correct. It doesn't eliminate all of these problems, but trying

to correct some of the problems that the tax code creates by offering preferred tax status to employer-sponsored insurance.

That encourages people to purchase medical care through insurance rather than directly.

It encourages people to purchase health insurance through an employer rather than

directly from an insurance company.

And that's really lousy insurance.

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