Ron Wyden Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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 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 .

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.

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.

Authorities this broad give the national security bureaucracy the power to scrutinize the personal lives of every law-abiding American. Allowing that to continue is a grave error that demonstrates a willful ignorance of human nature. Moreover, it demonstrates a complete disregard for the responsibilities entrusted to us by the Founding Fathers to maintain robust checks and balances on the power of any arm of the government. That obviously raises some very serious questions. What happens to our government, our civil liberties and our basic democracy if the surveillance state is allowed to grow unchecked? As we have seen in recent days, the intelligence leadership is determined to hold on to this authority. 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.

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 think I've got the best job around.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 is a fundamental principle of American democracy that laws should not be public only when it is convenient for government officials to make them public. They should be public all the time, open to review by adversarial courts, and subject to change by an accountable legislature guided by an informed public. If Americans are not able to learn how their government is interpreting and executing the law then we have effectively eliminated the most important bulwark of our democracy. That's why, even at the height of the Cold War, when the argument for absolute secrecy was at its zenith, Congress chose to make US surveillance laws public. Without public laws, and public court rulings interpreting those laws, it is impossible to have informed public debate. And when the American people are in the dark, they can't make fully informed decisions about who should represent them, or protest policies that they disagree with. These are fundamentals. It's Civics 101. And secret law violates those basic principles. It has no place in America.

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.

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.