This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 16th, 2003.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The U.S. health sector is far from a free market.

Fortunately, there are corners of the U.S. health sector where market forces have

had room to breathe, where markets have made health care better, more affordable, and

more secure, and importantly, more universal.

Michael Cannon is author of the new book,

Recovery, a guide to reforming the US health sector.

It's available today.

Policy people love charts, Michael Cannon.

And if there's one chart in health care that I think about often,

it is the one showing the groups of services or products in health care that have shown steady sustained

declines in price and those that have done the opposite.

And this seems to make a clear point,

but is that really how it works?

That is, there are these groups of products and services where the price tends to fall and others where it tends to flat line or go up.

In my most recent book, Recovery,

a guide to reforming the US health sector,

we've got one of those charts.

We compiled it from a series of studies

that economists and employers and health insurance companies did,

experimenting with one innovation, just one innovation,

...