Ron Wyden Health Quotations

Without Free Choice Vouchers, there is little in the health reform law that discourages employers from increasingly passing the burden of health care costs onto their employees.

It is hard to miss the irony in the fact that the very same week that Republicans were publicly heralding Congressman Paul Ryan's plan to inject market forces into the American health care system, they were crafting a budget deal to strip them from the health reform law.

Under the Healthy Americans Act, you're in charge of your health care - not your employer. If you lose your job, change jobs or just can't find a job, your health insurance is guaranteed to stick with you.

If you like the health insurance that you have you should be able to keep it, but if you don't like the health insurance you have, you should be able to choose something else.

For the amount of money that the country is going to spend this year on health care, you can go out and hire a doctor for every seven families in the US and pay the doctor almost $230,000 a year to cover them.

The reality is that the special interest groups that have lobbied against Free Choice Vouchers object to any measure that would empower employees to have a say in their health benefits because it begins to erode their power in the current health care system.

While Free Choice Vouchers didn't fulfill my vision of a health care system in which every American would be empowered to hire and fire their insurance company, they were a foothold for choice and competition and a safety valve for Americans whose employers are already forcing them to bear more and more of their family's health insurance costs.

I believe that whether you love your job or hate your job, get laid off or are just in-between jobs, you deserve health care that can never be taken away.

I believe the most important aspect of Medicare is not the structure of the program but the guarantee to all Americans that they will have high quality health care as they get older.