In a recent article Ralph Nader attacks several critics of Obama’s health care reform proposal, including Cato:

Now enters the well-insured libertarian Cato Institute with full-page ads in the Washington Post and The New York Times charging Obama with pursuing government-run health care. A picture of Uncle Sam pointing under the headline “Your New Doctor.” Nonsense. The well-insured people at Cato should know better than to declare that this “government takeover” would “reduce health care quality.”

I agree that Cato employees are “well-insured” – a description so appropriate that Nader used it twice in a single paragraph. At Cato we have Health Savings Accounts, which are probably the closest thing to free market health insurance allowed by law.


It’s nice to see Nader, a proponent of socialized medicine, praise HSAs. But it’s unfortunate that his preferred options for health care would abolish HSAs entirely.