This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 20th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Most presidential candidates are pushing universal coverage in health care.

Michael Cannon, director of Cato's health policy studies,

doesn't like what so-called universal coverage implies.

Instead of working toward universal coverage, he says the goal of U.S. health care should be ever increasing quality and ever increasing availability.

Two outcomes not always guaranteed by current universal coverage systems.

So he started a group he's calling the anti-ununiversal coverage club.

I had been wanting to generate a discussion, you know, within the free market community

about what should be the goal of health care reform and I've been looking for an opportunity to challenge this assumption that that is very prevalent on the left and it has been gaining traction even within the free market community that we need to be doing is providing universal coverage,

providing health insurance to everyone.

So I was actually reading National Review and saw that they had in a recent issue the editors of National Review

Ran an editorial where they came out against the idea of providing health insurance to everyone

They said that the only way to provide health insurance to everyone would be for the government

to force everyone to purchase health insurance or to have the government provide health insurance

to everyone and neither of those options would be attractive.

They said that what we should be doing is pulling the government back so that you know getting

the government out of our health care sector which would make health insurance a lot more affordable

to a lot more people and they acknowledge that yeah even when you do that there will be some people

who don't purchase health insurance and what should we do about them and their answer was

leave them alone.

It's a free country.

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