This is a Cato Special Podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. Is the Obama administration offering the public a false choice on health care reform?

U.S. Representative Paul Ryan believed so.

He says the choice between a government health plan or no reform at all is the definition of a narrow debate.

Ryan gave the keynote address at the Cato Institute's conference on health care reform held June 17,

2009.

This is the first part of his comments.

I'll tell you about some ideas that some of us in Congress are putting out there in health care, but I want to

first frame the debate and explain why we put this bill out there that we did put out there.

Number one, the president and the Democrats are giving the American people a false choice.

The president was in Green Bay just last week with this town hall meeting, watched it intently.

And the choice they're saying is, either you stick with this status quo and gosh that's so bad or you take our plan

It is either this public plan option with all of its bells and whistles and all of its promises

cloaked in the rhetoric.

If you like what you've got you can keep it.

We just want more choice in competition.

We just want to keep those insurance companies honest or the status quo.

There's nothing out there.

No one has proposed another thing at all.

That's simply not the case. And that is not the necessary choice that are confronting the American people.

There are other things to do and other ways to fix this problem.

But first, let me just touch off of what Ed did, which is if we do go down this path of what

we call the public policy option, the public choice option, the public plan option.

...