This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 10th, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The challenge is facing a return to a more rational health care system in the United States

continued amount. Even before Obamacare, David Gold... health care

David Goldhill alleges, as his book title indicates,

catastrophic care, how American health care killed my father

and how we can fix it. He spoke at the Cato Institute in September.

My interest in health care began with what happened to my father.

My dad at the age of 82,

after work one day, walked into a hospital with some shortness of breath.

They kept him for observation overnight.

Within that day, he acquired an infection in the hospital

that led to a series of infections that ultimately killed him.

And obviously, this is an extraordinary personal tragedy and I think what

turned my interest from the personal grief to the broader issues of health care is

that within a month after my father died the New Yorker published a piece by

Atul Gondi about Peter Pronavo's effort to get hospitals to reduce the

incidence of acquired infections.

In that article, he mentioned that roughly 100,000 Americans die every year from hospital infections.

There's roughly 200,000 that die from mistakes of all times, but that many of these infections were in fact easily preventable.

And Pronovost had come up with a series of protocols to prevent most of them, almost two-thirds

of them at hospitals that had adopted them. What was interesting to me as someone who just

...