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.

Today's modest action starts the long march to start to reform the tax breaks as they relate to the oil industry, and limits these incentives to the smaller oil companies that actually need the help the most,

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.

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 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.