Welcome to Econ Talk brought to you by the Library of Economics and Liberty I'm your host

Russ Roberts of George Mason University, podcasting today from Stanford University's Hoover

Institution.

My guest today is John Cogan.

John is the Leonard and Shirley Eli senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution and

a professor in the public policy program at Stanford University.

He's also the author of Healthy, wealthy and wise five steps to a better healthcare system,

a book he's written with Glenn Hubbard and Daniel Kessler.

John, a lot of people say you can't trust the market to handle healthcare.

After all, look how badly it works.

Costs are out of control, millions are uninsured.

What's your response to that claim?

Well, healthcare is in fact very similar to every other commodity, although people don't

perceive it to be so.

People somehow think of healthcare as being special.

But ask yourself, is healthcare any less important than food and shelter?

And the answer is no.

What's different about healthcare is the way we consume it and the way we purchase it.

And what I mean there is that we don't see ourselves as spending our own money for most

of our healthcare.

I'm like, say, food or that's right.

That's right.

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