This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 10th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Who among you would build a house without first counting the cost?

Well, apparently the U.S. Senate.

Many senators want a full accounting of the public and private sector impositions caused

by changing health care in the United States.

So far, that cost estimate has not been forthcoming.

Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, offers his thoughts.

If you look at the first iteration of the President's health plan, the first one that was introduced in Congress.

It was back in June that the House introduced a complete bill and ever since then we have

been looking at certain cost estimates of the legislation, but never a complete cost

estimate.

The legislation in the House and in the Senate would trigger about a trillion dollars in new federal spending, would impose unfunded

mandates on the states of maybe 25 or 33 billion dollars over the next 10 years, but they would also require private

individuals, individuals employers to spend their money on health insurance.

We haven't seen a cost estimate of those private sector

mandates and they could more than double the cost of the legislation from

one trillion to maybe 2.5 trillion dollars.

So in June is when we saw the first

iteration of the Obama Health Plan.

In October, there was an interesting letter that was signed by eight Democratic

senators, I should say eight Democratic caucasing senators, because one of them was Senator

...