This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 9, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's worth remembering and repeating.

The tax bill did not repeal Obamacare.

It may have zeroed out the individual mandate but a massive share of the

Affordable Care Act remains in place and the Act still hands a huge amount of power to the

Department for Health and Human Services. Sal Newso is Vice President for Policy at the James Madison Institute.

We spoke at the Kito Institute's State Health Policy Summit last month.

The individual mandate has been zeroed out in the tax bill. People have

equated that with repeal, which is not quite the same thing. It's still on the books,

but the penalty associated with not buying government-approved

health insurance is zero, at least for the foreseeable future.

And people have tried to make arguments about what that

actually means what does it actually mean in your view and what are some of

the the impacts that people aren't talking about that you see on the horizon?

Sure and I think it's important to look at this historically as kind of the genesis of how

this all came about and I think that that will kind of give

some context to what it means going forward.

So if you hearken back all the way to the campaign between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton when they ran in the primaries,

they were both running on a health care reform platform.

And Hillary Clinton had get coverage. Well he flipped come 2008 and in his kind of push for health care reform

in 2009 it became an essential part of passing a bill that would kind of tweak health

...