Robert Reich

Back in September when President Obama addressed the joint session of Congress on health care, the Huffington Post carried the above video of Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich stating what Huffingtom described as " the case for the public option in a very clear and succinct fashion."

In the video, Mr. Reich sings the praises of Obama's public option health care plan and recommends that everyone across the nation should make their voices heard in support of same. 

Now what th Huffington Post and the rest of the liberal mainstream media will not tell you is that in an audio recording from a September 2007 speech to an audience at the UC Berkeley, Reich reveals what he believes an honest liberal presidential candidate would say about health care. The "truth" about health care as Reich sees it is quite shocking and as you can hear on the recording, he is definitely not kidding. Here is a transcript of the brutal truth about health care as Robert Reich sees it:

I'll actually give you a speech made up entirely, almost on the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is and a candidate will never say, but what a candidate should say if we were in the kind of democracy where citizens were honored in terms of their practice of citizenship and they were educated in terms of what the issues were and they could separate myth from reality in terms of what candidates would tell them:

"Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I'm so glad to see you and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. And that's true and what I'm going to do is that I am going try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people but that means you, particularly you young people, particularly you young healthy people...you're going to have to pay more.

"Thank you. And by the way, we're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die."

"Also I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid---we already have a lot of bargaining leverage---to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. What that means, less innovation and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market which means you are probably not going to live much longer than your parents. Thank you."

Here is the audio of his 2007 speech.

I can't for the life of me understand why the New York Times is not "tuned into" these contradictory statements by Mr. Reich. 

Oh, did I forget to mention that Mr. Reich is now an "economics advisor" to President Obama?

Peter J. Mahon