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.

If you're going to have a public subsidy to education, vouchers are clearly a better way of delivering it. They should result in some loosening up and privatization of the government school system.

When I was mayor of New York, my views changed. I began as mayor of New York City thinking that I could reform the New York City school system. After two or three years, four years, I became an advocate of choice, of scholarships, and vouchers, and parental choice, because I thought that was the only way to really change the school system.

Sure, if you're a well to do family, you always have the option of sending your children to private schools where teachers spend less time disciplining kids and more time teaching them. However, this option is beyond the reach of most households. And this is what makes school vouchers such a promising solution for lower and middle income families.

Whoever becomes Education Secretary has to have a love and passion for public schools. Not charter schools, not vouchers, but public schools.

Housing vouchers are a vital lifeline for many people I know in New Orleans and around the country, including struggling artists.

I would take vouchers, do sums in my head just to get some eggs and bread or a tin of cheap Irish stew. I'd be starving and want two tins but couldn't afford it. The poorer you are the hungrier you feel.

Legislatures not driven to desperation by the problems of public education may be able to see the threat in vouchers negotiable in sectarian schools.

Most blacks want school vouchers, but most liberals vehemently oppose them. Why? Because what is good for teachers' unions is of more importance to the Left than what is good for blacks. Who, then, is racist? By their own admission, and by the policies they pursue, the answer is the people who call themselves progressive.

Republicans get a lot of money from big business, but they are not tied to the union dollar. As a result they have been aggressive advocates of school reform, charter schools and vouchers for private schools.

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.

I'm totally opposed to vouchers. I will fight them tooth and nail.

American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education.

Struggling to take care of my daughter on my own, I needed whatever government assistance I qualified for - a few hundred bucks a month in food stamps, free school lunches, childcare vouchers and coupons for milk and cheese - while I simultaneously worked as a maid, juggling 10 clients between going to class to put myself through college.

I used to sign vouchers and sign-out sheets with 'Alexandra Dee.'

Studies show that recipients of Section 8 vouchers have tended to choose moderately poor neighborhoods that were already on the decline, not low-poverty neighborhoods.

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.

Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don't think it works that way, and I've been watching this for a longtime.

Another example of the educational inequality is the current debate over publicly financed school vouchers which will provide educational opportunities to a privileged handful, but deprive public schools of desperately needed resources.

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.