Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) @ Hillsdale

Rep. Paul Ryan made these remarks at Hillsdale College:

Washington DC is no place to run health care services for the nation. Thus the Framers left public health decentralized. But if there were any doubt, the history of Medicare and Medicaid is the proof. Real cost control has become a national nightmare. Fraud has proliferated despite every effort to stop it. Program costs are always underestimated. In 1966 the cost of Medicare to the taxpayers was about $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost taxpayers only about $12 billion by 1990 (adjusted for inflation). The actual cost? Nearly nine times as high - $107 billion. By 2006 Medicare reached $401 billion while Medicaid added another $309 billion for a total of $710 billion.

The health care programs Democratic leaders are pushing are outrageously expensive and fiscally irresponsible. The federal Health Care takeover will subsume about one-sixth of our national economy. Combined with current federal, state, and local spending, government will control about 50 percent of total national production. At this point the goal of centralized administration will be in sight, with less than half of our once free economy to be brought under government control.

There are essentially three models for health care delivery available to us. First, today's broken model in which bureaucratized insurance companies monopolize the field in each state - this is the "business-government partnership" model, the "crony capitalism" that corrupts our economy. Second, the Progressives' model where centrally administered government takes over the field and government bureaucrats decide which services you are allowed to have. Third, the only true American model in my view, a free market in which health care services compete, and individuals - the consumer-patients and their doctors - are in control.

Read the Rest here: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/01/15/healthcare_and_progressivism_99904.html