This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 18th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Many health care reformers want to pattern reform after Medicare, a program riddled with waste

that will take tens of trillions of dollars from taxpayers in the coming decades.

The two senior fellow Mike Tanner says says what's not to love.

I think most seniors find that Medicare works for them

because by and large it takes care of people who aren't really

sick and most seniors aren't really sick. Medicare is not such a good deal for

taxpayers nor is it a particularly good deal for providers or people who get really

sick.

When people talk about reforming health care in the United States and they use Medicare as the example what what do they want to

emulate within the Medicare program?

Well Medicare does provide coverage to a wide number of people.

Seniors are almost universally covered

under the Medicare program.

They have relatively free choice of doctors.

More and more doctors are dropping out of the program, but by and large they can go see the doctor of their choice.

There's relatively little oversight by the government in terms of telling doctors how they must treat patients in this.

So the doctors and the providers feel or the patients feel like they're getting a pretty good deal

out of this and Medicare of course keeps the cost low for

those people who are getting the services they think they're getting sort of free care.

Medicare is in dire straits financially though and it's unsustainable as it stands now right?

Well the thing that makes Medicare so popular is the reason why it doesn't work.

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