This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, May 28, 2018. I'm Keelib Brown.

Medicare's touted efficiency is a decades long error or at worst a lie that from Charles

Silver co-author of the new Cato Institute book, Overcharged, why Americans pay too much for health care.

The book details how Medicare's overseers spend without regard to value, allow fraud to

decimate the program, and have few incentives to control costs.

What do you see as the major cost drivers for Medicare today?

Well, everybody knows that prescription drug prices are going up and Medicare treats a population of,

or covers a population of elderly people, many of whom are in need of expensive medications.

So drug prices are certainly a cost driver.

Going forward, the expansion of the Medicare population, owing to the retirement of the of the

retirement of the baby boon generation will also be a very significant

driver of costs.

And then there's just the general

tendency of the government to spend more money.

There's a lack of pressure exerted by the government to moderate the cost of medical treatments.

So in your discussion with some of the groups that are gathered here in Austin today,

you talked about this efficiency claim that is made on behalf of Medicare that I got to admit I

never heard before but you said it's it's a pretty widespread.

And the moment you brought it up, it made sense to me

that, yeah, the denominator and the numerator both

matter here when you're trying to calculate efficiency.

So as best you can, what is the argument

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