This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 3rd, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

In her new book, The Top 10 Myths of American Health Care, Sally Pipes gives lie to notions like government health care is more efficient, that we're spending too much on health care and that health information technology is a silver bullet.

We spoke following a forum on government-run health care held July 15, 2009.

Well I worked as an economist at the Fraser Institute, Canada's really only free market think tank.

And in the 80s we realized that there were long waiting lists, people were being

denied care, and so we started a publication called Waiting Your Turn,

hospital waiting lists in Canada.

So we brought out the first study in about 91,

but we started the work in 88,

and sure enough, people were having to wait for care.

So in 91, I got the opportunity to move to America and I jumped at it because I wanted

to get away from the Canadian health care system. But growing up under a government-run system,

you know, we faced long waiting lists for care, rationed care, and lack of access to the

latest technology.

Today, the average weight from seeing a primary care doctor to getting treatment by a specialist

is 17.3 weeks, that's over four months, which is double

when it was like about 9.3 weeks 10 years earlier.

So we've seen a tremendous increase in the weights for care and it's because government, when

the government took over the health care system, they thought doctors would be paid more,

people would have universal coverage and costs would be down. Well what people didn't realize, people in the

government didn't realize is that when you offer something for free, of course it's

not free you're paying for it with your taxes, people use a lot more of it when

...