Ron Wyden

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.

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.

Many health care providers, particularly physicians in rural and urban areas, are leaving the Government programs because of inadequate reimbursement rates.

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

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.

Since 1994, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have considered it politically risky to offer a plan to fix America’s broken health care system. The American public, though, has paid the price for this silence as health care costs skyrocketed, millions went uninsured, and millions more grappled with financial insecurity and hardship.

In today’s world, it is shortsighted to think that infectious diseases cannot cross borders. By allowing developing countries access to generic drugs, we not only help improve health in those nations, we also help ourselves control these debilitating and often deadly diseases.

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.