Thank you Chairman Harkin and Senator Cochran for the opportunity to support funding for public broadcasting.

Congress appropriated $150.4 billion for national research and development.

I look forward to continuing to work with you.

I have to go to the White House for the signing of the healthcare bill.

I look forward to working with you to see how we can shoehorn this in some way.

Reducing healthcare fraud and abuse has been a priority of mine for many years.

I first want to start by commending you for the outstanding work you're doing to help enact healthcare reform.

Overall, I think the President's budget is a good start.

I think we have to keep that activated, some way.

As a matter of fact, one other area that I've been a long-time supporter of is early childhood programs.

I'm wondering about that 6-month gap.

Thank you very much. And I just personally want to thank you, Senator Reed, for your leadership in this area.

I suggested, modestly, a year or two ago that perhaps what we ought to do on the Federal level is provide a free flu shot to every person in the country every year.

But the key seems to be whether the services are indeed high quality.

So we have to make sure that the quality of early childhood programs is consistently high.

That's pretty serious. And it costs a lot of money.

Pfizer just paid $2.3 billion, the largest settlement in United States history.

Thanks to President Obama and to the team he has around him, including you, and thanks to actions taken by Congress in the recovery bill, it seems that the economy is stabilizing.