This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 11th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Why do government-run health care programs work so hard to prevent enrollees from spending their own money on their own health care.

Attorney Kent Masterson Brown argues in an upcoming Cato policy analysis that Medicare

and Congress have taken actions to prevent many people from seeking medical

care that they fund by themselves.

The analysis, the freedom to spend your own money on medical care, a common casualty

of universal coverage is available

October 15th. You argue in your policy analysis that the freedom to spend

our own money on medical care is a casualty of universal coverage but

that is a freedom that most people are perfectly willing to give up they don't want to spend their own money

they want to spend your money and my money

well of course that historically has has been the case and it has been the case since the rise of third-party payment in health care

where even prior to Medicare private insurance companies were promoting the idea that they would take

care of your health care costs and of course you would pay premiums during the course of the year

but would be insulated from the real costs of the health care you were receiving

and this this same model has been

uh... used by Congress and the uh... health care bureaucracy to uh... to really uh... put medicare

together and to enforce medicare and the idea of course is to literally uh... there's a huge benefit to everybody, large

yes to everybody if they can create a system whereby you are in fact

insulated from the costs and it's a it's popular in the

sense that you know large numbers of people like this idea because then they

...