Welcome, this is Anastasia Global for Cato Daily Podcast, Tuesday, June 5th.

For today's episode, I wanted to address the health care issue that

preoccupies the current front-runners for the Democratic presidential

nomination as well as just about every American. Not to mention filmmaker

Michael Moore in his new documentary of dubious credibility,

Sicko, due out this summer.

The American health care system needs reform, that much is clear.

Much murkier is the question of how to reform it. In today's

podcast Cato's director of health and welfare studies Michael Tanner.

Two issues dominated the presidential debate on Sunday was Iraq and health care so

let's just talk about the latter. Clinton and Obama have recently

unveiled their plans for reforming health care and then there was the Edwards

plan a little while earlier. How are these plans different?

Well, actually, there's a great deal of similarity between these plans. They're all sort of

based on the basic idea that came out of the 1993 Clinton health care reform that is managed

competition all of them involve setting up regional or some type of

exchange or connector that would market health care.

All of them would involve creating a government-run entity that would compete with private insurance plans.

And generally, they involve some sort of a mandate under Edwards and

Hillary's plans they would have an individual mandate

Obama would have a mandate on businesses all of them are designed ultimately to

achieve universal coverage although I think Obama

...