I find it very, very helpful that we have national policies established by Congress in this area.

A majority of Americans--more than 186 million people--live in areas where there is enough air pollution to endanger their lives or threaten their health.

We have tri-partisan support for our legislation, Democrats, Republicans and one Independent from Connecticut.

Passage of our bill also provides a certainty of predictability that industry in America needs.

We appreciate your leadership and your energy, the energy that you have brought to Delaware and clean energy, clean energy to our environment into our economy.

As Senator Carper has said, air pollutants do not recognize State boundaries.

Thank you, Senator Voinovich, as well.

Almost 20 years have passed since Congress made significant revisions to the Clean Air Act.

But again, if you are getting up to the 70-80 percent level at every one, what you have to do in order to achieve an overall 90, you are still only talking about very small differences between those plants.

Finally, I would like to mention briefly the 53 percent nationwide reduction in NOx. This is an important step forward.

The larger the database, the greater the potential for identifying fraud.

I think IRS has a similar kind of approach where we recover monies that have been, frankly, recovered because of tax evasion.

I also understand that there is still considerable debate over inherently safer technologies.

The next step is to go out and recover the money that has been improperly paid if there is a recovery to be had.

All right. So that means by the end of next calendar year?

We have been using recovery audit contractors... to go out and try to track down fraud and recover money.

Dedicated those errors or dedicated the resources? You said 'dedicated those errors,' but you mean dedicated resources.

What do you need in terms of change in attitude, change in direction, change in regulation, change in legislation?

I actually voted to create [the Medicare prescription drug program], and we want to hear about not just the good that it is doing.

But, we could say, well, we are getting $600 million, $700 million, that is a pretty good way to measure success.

It is not enough to be good. You have to be great and continue to get better.

One of the ideas is to allow the employees who stop smoking, lose weight, control their cholesterol, control their blood pressure to actually receive premium discounts for up to 30 percent if they do the right thing for themselves and for…

It is a serious issue, and the oversight of prescription drugs is incredibly important.

Are there audits that you are awaiting permission to begin?

Their strategy at CMS and the MEDICs was to use proactive data analysis to identify the problems and prevent them before they occurred.