This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 4, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown. Innovation in medicine is stymied by a regulatory model rooted in the progressive era

where if a new way of doing things is not

expressly permitted it is very likely forbidden. Jeff Rose is a senior attorney at

the Institute for Justice at the Cato Institute last week Rose discussed the legal impediments to the burgeoning field of telemedicine.

One of the reasons why telemedicine presents such a challenge is because medicine is a vivid illustration of a is forbidden unless it is expressly permitted.

So this amazing, interesting fresh innovation comes along

and all the medical boards say, well, we can't do that.

We need to write 10,000 regulations to be able to do it.

We have to completely subdue it with the

regulatory process because after all this is America if we don't have a

telemedicine statute you could be certain of one thing you better not be doing it.

And in part that's because we have a 19th century or early 20th century regulatory model.

We have 50 different states each with our own regulatory boards and that doesn't even take

into account the fact that Americans can now talk to people all over the world.

There are billions of people who would benefit from the expertise of well-educated Americans,

and it's completely unclear whether or not they can get it.

Now the thing about telemedicine is that at bottom it's just two people talking to each other.

That's it. People are talking to each other.

One person wants some knowledge that another person has and they want to share it.

Now at least by reputation, we live in a free country. So what does the First Amendment,

the Free Speech Clause in particular, have to say about that.

...