This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 13th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

One of the worst sins of the Affordable Care Act is that it effectively outlawed most health

insurance.

That from Cato adjunct scholar Jeffrey Singer,

he says the focus of reforming health insurance

should be simply legalizing the practice of buying and selling it.

You argue that health insurance, as we once knew it, is illegal.

For all intents and purposes it is prior to the Affordable Care Act

going into effect in 2014 people just like with any other kind of insurance people could buy any kind of insurance that any insurance company is willing to

sell them.

So for example, just like with a business, if you have a particular issue, because remember insurance was designed to help deal with high-cost,

catastrophic type, unpredictable events. So a business regularly goes to an

insurer and says I have this situation I want to protect myself against. Can you

insure me against that?

And they could to this day design a product to fit that particular situation, run the numbers

and say, I can insure you, but it'll cost you this in this amount.

Same thing was true for health insurance until the ACA.

What the ACA did was basically establish a category of health insurance called ACA compliant

insurance. The federal government basically designed insurance. So no longer

could you go to an insurance company and say I have, I don't need obstetrics coverage, I don't

need dentistry for children or eyeglasses for children, I just need something that would

...