Good stuff. An excerpt (also see this Laffer op-ed from the WSJ if you missed it from yesterday’s Web Briefing):

RUSH: Well, I thank you very much for that. It’s mutual, then. I have a summary here of your findings. Let me just run through a couple bullet points and then you can take it and expand on this. “The current proposals being discussed in Washington, House and Senate, would raise the total federal government expenditures by 5.6% more than otherwise, adding $285.6 billion to the deficit in 2019, would increase national health care spenders by an additional 8.9%. After all this, it would still leave 30 million Americans uninsured.” Fill in the blanks here for us.
LAFFER: Well, you know, it’s a fairly straightforward thing. Without going through the specific numbers — although I’d be more than happy to do that — you know, whenever you separate people from the purchases they make… If you walked into a store and weren’t told what anything cost and you could pick out whatever you wanted free, you’re going to be squanders, you’re going to buy things that are way too expensive that you don’t want. I mean, one of the ways controlling costs is making people responsible for their own money, for their own expenditures and that is exactly what this program does not do. It makes the separation between the patient and the doctor and health services further and further removed, and takes away all control of costs. And, frankly, as P.J. O’Rourke put it, he said, “If you think health care is expensive now, just wait ’til you see how much it costs when it’s free,” and that’s exactly what we’re doing here.
RUSH: You’re an economist, accomplished economist, and obviously you did a lot of research here. One of my bugaboos is, in a political sense, is that when somebody, like an Obama or any Democrat, proposes something massive like this, the premise — which is, we have to have health care reform — is automatically accepted and we start analyzing the numbers and say, “That’s too much here; it’s too much there.” Do you get into the motivation for people who are behind this monster? Does that interest you at all, why they do it?
LAFFER: Well, it interests me, but it’s not in this paper. That’s not our purpose. As you say, I’m an economist. I worry about the costs of the program, which are going to be a lot more than anyone else suggests. I’m worried about the access and the availability of the services of the health care, and I’m worried about the quality of it. I mean, that’s what economists really worry about. In this program, it’s a real problem.