In case you missed, it Congressman Paul Ryan appeared on Fox News Sunday. You can watch it here.

On the direction of the current Administration:

I think the President is giving us an agenda that takes the American ideal of promoting equal opportunity in people’s lives and replaces it with more of a European notion of having the government more involved in our lives and equalizing the results of people’s lives.  This limits people from reaching their potential. It drains them of their ability and incentive to make the most of their lives, and lulls them into lives of complacency and dependency on the government. That isn’t who we are. That is why we, as Republicans, must offer spirited alternatives and better ideas.

Can we compromise on health care reform?

I hope so. I hope there is a kind of a compromise. But what the President wants and what his leaders in Congress are telling us is they don’t want bipartisanship.  My favorite Democrat in Congress, Jim Cooper has told us his party says don’t work with Republicans. Chairman Dodd has told us he doesn’t want bipartisanship.  So the kind of health care reform that the President and his party are trying to push is the kind of health care reform where the government ends up taking the entire system over.

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Can government plan compete on a level playing field and offer real competition?

Let me put it this way: having the government compete against the private sector -- it’s kind of like my 7-year-old daughter’s lemonade stand competing against McDonald’s.  It’s the government being the referee and player in the same game. Don’t just listen to me; listen to all the actuaries and experts that tell us that the government public plan option quickly becomes a government-run monopoly.

What happens is it is impossible for the private sector to be able to compete fairly with the public sector: the public sector plan pays so much lower prices that it drives prices up for the private sector and it forces firms to dump their employees under the public plan. One firm, the Lewin Group, is telling us as many as 120 million Americans in about three or four years will lose their private insurance and be dumped onto the public plan option. That’s not what we want to see happen.