This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 28, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama said throughout 2009 and earlier this year that you could keep your health plan if you

wanted to under his health care proposal.

That that pledge is turning out to have been false.

Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the the Cato Institute says it gets worse.

For everyone who thought they could keep their plan, as was promised by the President in the run-up to the passage of the health care law

it seems like a whole lot of markets are being irreparably altered for the worse which gives lie to that pledge.

What's become clear since the first provisions of Obamacare have taken effect

is that people are not going to be able to keep their health plan even if

they like it. A lot of people are going to be thrown out of their current health

plans because of industry consolidation that results from the law.

Principal Financial Group is one insurance company that has said it is going to get out of the health insurance market,

leaving nearly 1 million Americans to find another health plan.

As many as 69% of all employer plans are going to have to either

switch to a more expensive plan or a more expensive version of their own plan in order to comply with all the mandates in

Obamacare. What's been most interesting is to watch the market for child-only

health insurance. You remember the President Obama promised that this health care law would guarantee

access to health insurance for children with pre-existing conditions.

The problem with imposing that rule is that if you tell insurers that they have to cover kids with

preexisting conditions and at the same premiums as everyone else, then no one's going to buy health

insurance for their children until they're on their way to insurance for their children until they are diagnosed

...