This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 13th, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

Obamacare promised not to contribute to the federal budget deficit,

a promise to achieve universal coverage,

and it promised you could keep your insurance.

By those benchmarks and more, Obamacare is a failure.

So says Cato Institute Senior Fellow Michael Tanner, author of the new Cato report Bad Medicine, a guide to the real

costs and consequences of the new health care law. It's available at Cato.org.

When the health care bill passed, the president and the Democratic leaders in Congress

assured us that this was going to take us towards universal coverage, every American

would have health insurance, it was going to control rising insurance premiums, it was going to control rising insurance premiums.

It was going to control health care spending overall in the country because we were on an unsustainable course.

It turns out that none of these things is true.

In terms of universal coverage, yes, it does make an improvement over the status quo,

but by 2019, it's still going to leave 21 to 22 million Americans without health insurance.

And it's also important to note that of the people who are going to get insurance under

this bill, about half are not going to get private health insurance.

They're simply going to be dumped into the Medicaid system, which we know provides miserable

quality care.

Second, of course they said that this was going to reduce health insurance premiums.

And the President warned us that unless we were to act, health insurance premiums could double in the next six years.

Well, the reality is, according to the Congressional Budget Office, that having passed

this bill, and it's now law, insurance premiums are going to roughly double in the next

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