George Miller: “What we found out, unfortunately, is that, this never ceases to amaze me, but we do have very upstanding members of our…”

“What we found out, unfortunately, is that, this never ceases to amaze me, but we do have very upstanding members of our communities and corporate members of our community who are fully prepared to rip off the taxpayers. And what we found at one point was that a number of formula companies were charging very excessive rates for the formula for the newborn infants in this program, so we went to a program of bidding and making them compete on a national basis for these contracts and it dramatically lowered the cost of the formula about a billion dollars. And that was able to be plowed back into extending the number of infants that can be served. Interestingly enough, in the bill that we will be considering, although this was a proposal by, I believe, the now chairman of the committee, the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Goodling], that we tried to make sure that this bidding would continue and that amendment was rejected in the committee. So now we have the ability to see people negotiate contracts and, as I said, unfortunately, one of the sad things in our job from time to time is that we find out that there are professional people, well-educated people, and a lot of other people, who are fully prepared to rip the Federal Government off for their own narrow gains.”