Ron Wyden Care Quotations

When the Veterans Affairs Department implemented a program to provide home-based health care to veterans with multiple chronic conditions - many of the systems most expensive patients to treat - they received astounding results.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If we are going to have a health care program that works for all Americans, we are going to have to get beyond the blame game.

It's time to look beyond the budget ax to assure access to health care for all. It's time to look for bipartisan solutions to the problems we can tackle today, and to work together for tomorrow - building a health care system that works for all Americans.

With the loss of Free Choice Vouchers, hundreds of thousands of workers will now be forced to choose between their employers' unaffordable insurance or going without health care.

Fixing health care and fixing the economy are two sides of the same coin.