Over at TWS, Mary Katherine Ham flags this video of Rep. Paul Ryan wiping the floor with Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel on health-care reform. The whole thing is edifying. However, it’s this exchange that seems to cut to the heart of the matter:

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Competition is at the heart of America. To deny Americans competition by denying them the option of a public plan seems to me to be un-American.
Rep. Paul Ryan: What’s weird about that line right there, Katrina, is that I know you and others are very much in favor of a single-payer plan, which is obviously to deny competition and have the government run it all. What’s concerning about this debate with me is that you’re using capitalist rhetoric to try and move a plan that is inherently anti-market.
The problem is that the facts tell us this: A public plan option quickly becomes a government-run monopoly….The actuaries are telling us is that in a few short years, the public plan option displaces the private sector, employers dump their employees on the public plan, and then they have no choices but the public plan.
And so, let’s not try to sell a government-run plan using free market rhetoric. Let’s have an honest debate about what this bill is all about.

Yes, that’s exactly right. However, Vanden Huevel is hardly the only liberal health-care activist dishonestly proclaiming that a public option will simply contribute to a robust marketplace rather than undermine it. Here’s WaPo wunderkind Ezra Klein, who’s been promoted to the op-ed page today, for a piece called “A Market for Health Reform“:

Compared with the crazy-quilt system we have now, the idea behind the health insurance exchange is almost weirdly simple: It’s a single market, structured for consumer convenience, in which you choose between the products of competing health insurers (both public and private). This is not a new idea. It is how we buy everything from books to socks to soup.

I don’t know about you, but I buy all my books, socks and soup from the government. If sitting down to a nice steaming bowl of the Department of Agriculture’s Creamy Chicken Product #3489-MQP seems appetizing, why should buying health insurance from the government be threatening at all? (Of course, if the thought of the government being responsible for your next meal seems terrifying, after Klein’s food column today and the current enthusiasm for subsidizing everything from investment banks to cars, it’s probably only matter of time. Before long, Klein will be editing the federally subsidized Washington Pravda – another stupid idea he’s championing — and urging all comrades supportive of our glorious nation to do our patriotic duty and only drink half-rations of our government-provided broth.)

Suffice to say, this seems disingenous at best. There are certainly ways to create more of a market in health insurance that would be beneficial — loosening state requirements on insurance to create a national market for health insurance, decoupling insurance from employers, etc. But a health insurance exchange where every private option is undercut and eventually displaced by a government subsidized plan is pretty much the opposite of a “a market for health reform.” And proponents of a public option should admit as much.

*Just tweaking Ezra for his ridiculously over the top headline and unwarranted criticism of Bill Kristol.

(h/t Ace of Spades)