This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 21st, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Obamacare is being hammered out, but those sticking points among competing interests would be the plans undoing.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Mike Tanner is author of the new Cato paper, Obamacare To Come.

Seven Bad Ideas for Healthcare Reform reform available for download at Cato.org.

While there isn't going to be a specific Obama administration bill, it looks like they're going to leave it largely to Congress to write the actual legislation,

however, we have a pretty good idea if you look at what's leaked out of the Senate Finance Committee or out of the various House committees or even what the Obama administration itself has said is acceptable, we have a pretty good idea

what's going to be in the final bill.

And it is going to be a combination of mandates on individuals and business, regulation of the insurance market, and probably

physicians as well.

And then finally, some sort of government plan like Medicare that will compete with private

insurance.

Who is most likely to end up actually writing this bill?

Well, in the Senate the bill is going to be written primarily by Max Baucus, who's chairman

of the Senate Finance Committee, and Ted Kennedy, who is

drafting his own bill over at the Health and Labor Committee. They're going to

then merge those two bills to make the final Senate version. There's also a House bill that's less relevant

because frankly it's the Senate where the real action is but that House bill will

come out of three different House committees and then be merged into a single bill.

Right now, it seems like a lot of key players are very interested in achieving some sort of compromise,

but that of course is in the absence of any details about what actually

will be in a plan and how those various interest groups stand a loser gain. There's no doubt that a lot of the provider groups, people who opposed health care

reform back in 1993 say when Hillary Clinton was pushing her plan, this time they're trying to be at the table. I mean there's

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