Diana DeGette

It is not in the mission of SAMHSA to tell patients not to take their medication, is that correct?

I am hoping that those kinds of expenditures aren't being made right now with sequester and other cuts looming.

So that is, again, something else Congress should look at is do we really want to be just sending that money to the States without the scientific control of where those funds go, right?

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act and continued support of SAMHSA programs that work will go a long way in ensuring that people with serious mental illness have access to the treatments they need.

The Mental Health Parity Act...ensures that group health plans...do so in a manner that is comparable to coverage for general medical and surgical care.

Your passion about this issue is evident. We appreciate everything that you are doing to have these hearings on mental illness and gun violence.

I think there are people who would be willing to come forward and talk about their concerns and their issues.

I had--I was actually at the eye doctor, and the assistant came in, and she said she had a 19-year-old son diagnosed with bipolar, and he had become violent.

I think what we need to do is we need to--providers need to understand what their abilities are under HIPAA.

Misinterpretations of HIPAA and other private laws were also identified by the GAO and by President Obama's Gun Violence Task Force as an obstacle to reporting individuals who should be barred from gun ownership.

I am not going to blindly defend HIPAA, but I think we should be very, very careful when we contemplate changes to that statute.

We will read the testimony, and we will make sure we know what is going on.

This is really an important topic, the HIPAA issues, particularly as they relate to gun violence

I think we should also have our federal agencies work with the colleges because a lot of these problems seem to come with the colleges trying to balance the important privacy protections for their students.

I think we can all agree that HIPAA provides many important protections for people's medical privacy.

It is a hard balance because on the one hand it is like Ms. McGraw was talking about, you want these young people to not feel the stigma so that they will get medical treatment.

I know how difficult it is to have a child with a severe illness.

I would ask unanimous consent to place a letter dated April 25, 2013, about the position of these organizations regarding HIPAA.

Are you giving them extra effort to help them get their exchanges up and going?

There is no reason to think it won't work. It worked great in Massachusetts under Mitt Romney.

These are all big changes and the time to implement them is coming up very, very fast.

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise be uninsured will receive health insurance for the first time.

We need inspectional authority and full access to records in order to determine if a compounding pharmacy, in fact, is making products of concern.

I share everybody else's deep concern that the agency really fumbled around for about 10 years.

These people shouldn't be at risk, this poster over here with the black stuff floating, that is unacceptable.