This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 9th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown. The failures

of the Obamacare website are many, but should they have been expected? Should those who opposed

Obamacare from the beginning be pleased to the federal mechanism for extending coverage has performed so poorly?

And how do we get to a system where transparent price signals are again a key mechanism in the health care system.

Cato adjunct scholar Arnold Kling comments.

What is still puzzling about health care.gov is that the president was a week, two weeks before the

website launched comparing it to Amazon.com. Yeah, and that's a it's an interesting comparison, you know, Amazon or Kayak. And I think what people

don't understand is that Amazon and Kayak didn't just sort of emerge

out of thin air or they're not just, they're not the most natural result of trying to start a computer system or a web-based business.

In fact, Amazon and Kayak are the rare survivors of a tournament involving hundreds and hundreds of companies.

So trying different business models, different technical architectures, different web designs, and so we observe the winners of that tournament

and we expect to match the winners of that tournament with something that was designed by a law and by sort of a complex law with lots of sort of almost mutually inconsistent requirements.

But the difference between having a computer-based business and observing the outcome of the market process is, think in some ways the key lesson that people

need to learn from this, that you should have more respect for a market process that winnows out all the losers.

I mean, there were hundreds of health care.govs in the private sector.

It's not like the private sector doesn't mess up, doesn't have lousy software, doesn't have bad business models.

They happen all the time, but they are winnowed out

and as consumers we get to enjoy the winners.

Whereas when something is established by a legal process

with a government monopoly, the bad stuff

doesn't get winnow down.

So if I understand you correctly, I'm

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