This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 25, 2021.

I'm cable Brown.

Is Medicare bad health coverage?

According to a new report from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, it might be.

Michael Cannon directs health policy studies at the Cato Institute, we talked about

what makes Medicare so expensive and relatively lackluster. Most people don't know how Medicare works,

and a key element of Medicare as a going concern

is the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission or MedPAC.

What is that group? What do they do?

So Congress created this

enormous program

enormous program spends hundreds of

Medicare program.

This enormous program spends hundreds of billions of dollars

per year on tens of millions of people

providing them health care and ancillary services and it has to set prices for hundreds of thousands of services all across the country.

This is incredibly complicated business.

Most of the information that Congress had been getting about the program was coming from lobbyists,

from people who want Medicare to pay them more money.

And so Congress created this agency called MedPAC to try to provide more disinterested data to policy makers so that they could make hopefully less inefficient decisions.

And so MedPIC is a wonderful source of information for all sorts of things that are going right and wrong with the

Medicare program. These are people who believe in the Medicare program but are also

...