Ron Wyden quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Police departments no longer have to pay overtime or divert resources from other projects to find out where an individual goes - all they have to do is place a tracking device on someone's car or ask a cell phone company for that individual's location history and the technology does the work for them.

Because of the Korean free trade agreement, South Koreans who want Oregon blueberries are gonna see their prices go down because we will be getting rid of a 45 percent tariff on this Oregon product.

For Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm, 267,300 reserve component service men and women were called to service.

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.

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.

Men and women who have served in harm's way experience higher rates of divorce and suicide. Many battle the debilitating effects and stigma associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

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.

Pay-for-procedure or fee-for-service reimbursement rewards doctors and hospitals for volume - not keeping patients healthy or being efficiency. Pay-for-Performance is clearly one tool that can change the incentives to reward quality.

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.

Oregonians aren't the only ones who recognize the extraordinary service and sacrifice of their state's National Guard.

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.

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.

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.

I've written and passed laws to give Medicare beneficiaries access to life saving cancer drugs and to ensure that seniors don't have to give up the prospect of a cure when they go into hospice care.

There is an old saying that all roads lead to Rome. It seems the administration so often clearly believes that no matter what the evidence was at any particular time, essentially everything led to Saddam Hussein.

When I was 27 years old, I organized legal aid clinics to help low-income seniors. It was a life-altering experience.

Protect IP (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are a step towards a different kind of Internet. They are a step towards an Internet in which those with money and lawyers and access to power have a greater voice than those who don't.

I don't care who you love. If you love this country enough to risk your life for it, you shouldn't have to hide who you are.

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

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.

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.

It is hard to see Judge Roberts as a judicial activist who would place ideological purity or a particular agenda above or ahead the need for thoughtful legal reasoning.

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.

President Obama said it best during his state of the Union Address this year when he declared: 'I will go anywhere in the world to open new markets for American products. And I will not stand by when our competitors don't play by the rules.'

The Internet has changed the way we communicate with each other, the way we learn about the world and the way we conduct business.

Rather than waiting for future trials to determine rules that will impact every citizen, Congress should step in and write a law that takes every American's rights into consideration.

I voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, not because I thought it was the best we could do, but because I thought it was a whole lot better than the current system.

This house better get cleaned up in six months. The swamp is going to have to be drained pretty quickly.

Like any business, the oil industry runs on the basic premise of supply and demand. The more supply - the lower the price. The higher the demand - the higher price. In other words, the more people who can buy oil, the higher the price of oil.

Even under the best of circumstances, the road back from war is difficult.

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 took a little over a decade to build a coalition strong enough to beat the insurance companies, but in 1990, then Senator Tom Daschle and I passed a law regulating the private market for supplemental Medicare insurance policies.

Until relatively recently, law enforcement's ability to determine an individual's location and track their movements was largely limited to natural human powers of observation.

Let's hold insurance companies accountable the right way by making them put their whole customer base on the line.

The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life precisely because it has been an open-to-all land of opportunity where entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators are free to try, fail and then try again.

As Members of Congress we can now engage with our constituents via online innovations like the Huffington Post, while a small business in rural Oregon can use the Internet to find customers around the world.

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

The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque.

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.

You have an always-expanding, omnipresent surveillance state that's constantly chipping away at the liberties and freedoms of law-abiding Americans.

For those who believe executive branch officials will voluntarily interpret their surveillance authorities with restraint, I believe it is more likely that I will achieve my life-long dream of playing in the NBA.

I think we have to ask this administration, and the President specifically, about using their political capital now to stand up for the American consumer who is getting clobbered by these gasoline and oil prices.

The KXL pipeline would make it easy and cost effective for oil producers in Canada to transport oil to the Gulf of Mexico where it could be shipped to customers - not just in the United States - but around the world.

Trade wars arent started by countries appealing to respected, independent trade authorities. Rather, trade wars begin when one country decides to violate international trade rules to undercut another countrys industries.

If China is helping its domestic industries charge an artificially low price for solar panels and other environmental goods, then China is violating international trade rules that it agreed to when it became a member of the World Trade Organization.

Right now, there are a limited number of customers for Canadian oil. Due to simple geography - and without the pipeline - it's really only cost effective for Canadian oil producers to sell their oil to North American customers, mostly American Midwesterners.

The ethics laws do not let us tap out the truth in Morse code.

When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.

It is unclear exactly how many law enforcement agencies are currently using this capability, but it is reasonable to say that while resource limitations used to discourage the government from tracking you without a good reason, these constraints have largely disappeared.

The president has the authority to end this dragnet surveillance immediately

The Bush administration did stop filling the reserve in 2002 when it helped the oil industry. Now they should do it to help the consumer.

I think if progressives stay at this, continue at the grassroots level to make the case that all Americans should have choice, all Americans ought to be able to hold insurance companies accountable, I think we will have 60 votes in the United States Senate for a strong bill.

More customers for Canadian oil means that Canadian producers can charge more for their oil, which then means that American businesses and consumers will pay more for oil.

Trade wars aren't started by countries appealing to respected, independent trade authorities. Rather, trade wars begin when one country decides to violate international trade rules to undercut another country's industries.

The U.S. Senate does not allow legislative provisions to be included in appropriations bills, for much the same reason that most Americans are concerned about earmarks: it creates a slippery slope by which lobbyists and special interest groups can sneak provisions into large, must-pass legislation.

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

Congress should consult experts and consider alternatives and make 100% sure that any step it takes to police the Internet doesn't change the Internet as we know it.

Gasoline prices are soaring through the stratosphere, and the Federal Trade Commission, which is supposed to be standing up for the consumer, ought to stop playing footsie with the oil companies and take steps to protect the American people.

How can it be, in a country as strong and rich as this one, that tens of thousands of Americans who need legal representation are turned away every year because their government won't support the very program designed to help them?

I think I've got the best job around.

In order to do vigorous oversight, the leadership of the intelligence community has got to be straight with the American people and straight with the Congress. For there to be vigorous oversight, the intelligence community's got to be straight with the American people and the Congress and that has not been the case.

Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person's life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.

Part of what we're trying to do is lay out what really happened. For example, I've been trying to get across that the intelligence leadership did not just keep the country in the dark. They actively misled the country on key issues. When you have someone who heads the NSA saying we don't hold data at all on US citizens, that's one of the most misleading statements I believe that's ever been made about surveillance policy. And I think that now we're starting to get that message across.

Right at the heart of the Affordable Care Act is the ban on insurance companies discriminating against people with a pre-existing condition. And this part of the Affordable Care Act makes sure that health care is not just for the healthy and wealthy.

The combination of the growth of these digital technologies, the ability of the government to conjure up these secret interpretations, plus a very unusual and novel court make for this ever-expanding surveillance state. We so treasure our freedoms; we will regret it if our generation doesn't use this unique time to reform the surveillance laws and make it clear that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive. We can do both.

The government's collection authority, under the Patriot Act, is basically limitless. They can get the medical records and financial records, gun purchase records. And it also becomes part of another important issue that relates to the FISA court and the rest of the debate. It almost becomes a secret law, like there are two Patriot Acts. The one you read on the laptop essentially leads you to believe that there's some connection to terror .

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.

You essentially have a human-relations database on millions of Americans. The administration said, "Well we're not listening to calls, we don't collect content." As [Vice President] Joe Biden said when he was a United States senator, you don't need to listen to those calls. If you have who somebody called, when and where, and you learned, for example, somebody called a psychiatrist three times in the last few days and twice after midnight, you know a lot about that person that they may not want people to know about them, especially the government.