Republican presidential candidate John McCain will use a speech in Allentown, Pa., Wednesday to continue to push a health care insurance plan aimed at shifting programs to the open marketplace.

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The Arizona senator said Tuesday he wanted the country to move away from job-based coverage so that people can choose from competing policies.

He would offer families a $5,000 tax credit to help buy insurance policies, he said. Everyone would get the credit, whether he or she keeps a policy through an employer or shops for a new one.

"You simply choose the insurance provider that suits you best," McCain said in a speech Tuesday at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa.

"The health plan you chose would be as good as any that an employer could choose for you. It would be yours and your family's health care plan, and yours to keep," he said.

Missing from his proposal was its cost and an estimate of how many people it would help. There are more than 40 million people in the United States who don't have health insurance. A campaign adviser said that specifics will come later.

To pay for the tax credit, McCain would eliminate the tax exemption for people whose employers pay a portion of their coverage, raising an estimated $3.6 trillion in revenues. Companies that provide coverage to workers still would get tax breaks. McCain would also cut costs by limiting health care lawsuits.

The goal is to move the health care industry away from job-based coverage toward competition among health insurance companies on the open market.

Critics of McCain's approach, including his two Democratic rivals, say it could leave sicker or older people without coverage as younger, healthier workers leave employer-based plans for cheaper ones; McCain's campaign says there would be a safety net to protect high-risk people.

McCain issued his own criticism of Democratic plans for health care, saying Obama and Clinton want government-run health care because they seek mandatory health care coverage -- Obama for children and Clinton for everyone.

"They urge universal coverage, with all the tax increases, new mandates, and government regulation that come along with that idea," McCain said. "The key to real reform is to restore control over our health care system to the patients themselves."