This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 8th, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

With seven years to think about how to do it, the House leadership's plan to replace Obamacare is well not good especially if what you want is a

free market in health care provision. Jim Banks is a freshman Republican

congressman from Indiana we spoke yesterday about replacing the Affordable Care Act,

earmarks, and immigration.

Having seen now at least portions of the Obamacare repeal bill, and I hate, I'm not sure that's even the right word for it

because it doesn't seem to replace many elements of the law as my colleague Michael Cannon here has pointed out this bill

retains so much more of the architecture of Obamacare than the bill that the House and Senate sent to President Obama's

desk just last year.

So can you give us a sense of what you've witnessed or what you think so far about the plan?

The replacement still allows for a number of the regulations,

the regulatory environment and

does not allow for the expansion of Medicaid and doesn't allow for the

undoing of that for a number of years.

The sheer cost we have yet to see the full CBO estimates of the cost of this

replacement plan, but we expect it to be substantial. For all of those reasons, I remain skeptical and have great reservations about the replacement

plan.

As a former state senator, I served for six years in the Indiana State Senate.

It was my hope that we would vote to repeal

Obamacare fully and replace it

with a free market patient-driven health care system that empowered the states,

whether through a full flexibility of Medicaid programs and the

...