Chris Dodd

The work on children is something that a lot of us, all of us, care about up here.

We are very proud of the fact that we have removed the financial incentive from the decisionmaking around medicine.

I've chaired or been the ranking member over the years of the Subcommittee on Children and Families.

I don't think there's any argument that obesity is not one of the causes of four chronic illnesses we are grappling with.

Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who is also very interested in this subject matter, has raised some very good questions.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has been my best ally.

Thank you very much, Mr. Rother. We appreciate it very much.

We have written a provision for the bill very similar to the best pharmaceuticals for children provision.

Well, thank you, Dr. Raines, very, very much.

The provisions that are in this bill, I think, are excellent in moving things forward.

Thank you again, Mr. Chairman, for your leadership and for this opportunity to express our support for the public health provisions of this historic legislation.

It has been his inspiration for four decades to try and get a national healthcare plan in place that is accessible and affordable and is value-based, quality-based.

I don't know of another issue that we've grappled with as complex as this and one that deserves our undivided attention.

I think to say that we have to hold coverage hostage to cost control is to say we're going to hold this small piece hostage to this enormous piece.

I think it's very important to recognize that the cost of covering every single American with health insurance is less than 1 year's growth in our national health bill.

We want to be able to have primary care physicians encouraged to take the time to do the counseling, to do the diet counseling, and the current payment mechanism just doesn't allow for that to happen.

We're bleeding the system to death financially is what's going on. We're losing healthcare. We're also losing good jobs as a result.

If we could really just go ahead and create a national health system, we would solve all of these problems.

The current payment structure for physicians really encourages... volume services rather than value services.

So are members of this committee.

I think that the individual mandate is, in fact, the way to go.

We need to get this right and so we need your involvement and your participation if we're going to do this.

We know how to solve these problems. We have to change the structures of our payment so that we're paying for quality treatment processes and teamwork processes as opposed to just individual practitioners.

We would appreciate any data and statistics which you think would be helpful to the committee, as well.

One of the suggestions here that's being talked about is to provide tax credits for smaller businesses.