This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's been about a year since the president signed Obamacare into law,

and that not so new health care law was ushered in with several specific promises made about how very little would change.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Michael Tanner, at the Cato Institute's annual benefactor's summit held last week

explained what was wrong, misleading, and outright disingenuous in those promises.

Next month will be the one year anniversary of the passage of Obamacare.

And if you remember at the time, actually in the, about two days before they passed it,

Nancy Pelosi told us that the time about two days before they passed it.

Nancy Pelosi told us at the time that we had to hurry up and pass the bill

so we could find out what was in it.

Well, we now have had a year to look at the bill and we're beginning to get a pretty clear idea of what was in it.

And I can tell you that it pretty much confirms that Cato was right all along.

Actually, shortly before the bill was written, was passed, I wrote a paper called Seven Bad Ideas for Health Care Reform, and I'm pleased to note that

Obamacare got all seven. But what do we know? What have we learned in the year since Obamacare has passed?

Well, the very first thing we learned I think is that no, you cannot keep your health insurance if you have it today and you like it.

Now, you know, I know that's shocking because our president did tell us something different and we know that no politician in Washington would ever lie to us.

But it does appear to be true that you cannot keep your health insurance.

We know, for example, we've now learned that if you have a flexible

spending account that well that's been cut in half. You used to be able to contribute $5,000 to your flexible spending

account. Now you can only contribute $2,500 to it. We know that if you have a flexible spending account or a health reimbursement account or a health savings account, you can no longer use those to purchase over-the-counter medications.

We got a little letter at Cato this year already informing us that we can no longer use our

HSAs for the purchase of over-the-counter medications.

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