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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.

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.

A premium support program is different than a voucher program. They're just fundamentally different.

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.

We have really good data that show when you take patients and you really inform them about their choices, patients make more frugal choices. They pick more efficient choices than the health care system does.

What Obamacare does is decreases choices and drives up cost.

It's common sense to be for middle-class tax cuts and tax cuts on small businesses, to be for not allowing Medicare to be turned into voucher care.

The good news is, Americans know firsthand the benefits of a free market - more choices, lower prices, higher quality - and there is no reason why we cannot help them see these same benefits in health care.

I will never turn Medicare into a voucher. No American should ever have to spend their golden years at the mercy of insurance companies. They should retire with the care and dignity they have earned.

I believe we must protect Medicare's guaranteed benefit, and I will oppose any effort to dismantle Medicare and turn it into a voucher system.