Honest debate demands, of all things, honesty

We've heard a lot of sniping about the public option as a part of any sick care reform. Unfortunately, much of it has been disingenuous and does not contribute to a rational and productive discussion.

In his entry this week, "How Not to Talk About Health Care", NYTimes ethics writer Randy Cohen takes some of our legislators to task on the subject:

In his critique of the public option, Representative Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, invoked the inability of his 7-year-old daughter’s lemonade stand to compete with McDonald’s. (You’d think she’d thrive, incidentally, what with lemonade not being on the McDonald’s menu.) “It’s impossible to have a level playing field with a public plan,” Ryan said, asserting that private insurers could be driven out of business by the unfair competitive advantages enjoyed by a government-sponsored insurer (presumably much as the University of Massachusetts turned Harvard into a ghost town, or the New York Public Library system drove Barnes & Noble into the ground). Again, this is not to challenge Ryan’s conclusions about the public option: that’s politics. It is to demand veracity in his arguments: that’s ethics.

Of course, this is what "liberalism" requires at its core and why I consider myself proudly liberal: A rational, ethical, FACT-BASED discussion and resolution to a problem, as it paints a stark contrast to the blindly partisan theorizing of idealogues like Ryan.