Ron Wyden

With a host of proposals on the table and a President examining new ideas for health reform, we have an obligation to give real reform our best shot.

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.

I agree with just about everyone in the reform debate when they say ‘If you like what you have, you should be able to keep it.’ But the truth is that none of the health reform bills making their way through Congress actually delivers on that promise.

It’s correct that I wanted health reform to do more to create choices and promote competition.

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.

Americans are free to choose everything from what they eat, drive and watch on TV to the President of the United States. Yet, when it comes to allowing Americans to choose the health insurance that works best for them and their family, the freedom to choose suddenly becomes un-American.

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.

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.

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

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.