Elizabeth Warren

We passed a law requiring the SEC to write these rules, and we did that because they matter.

If you are confirmed, will you make it a top priority to get these rules back on the agenda and get them completed as soon as possible?

I do not think anybody in this room thinks that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or the City of Omaha, Nebraska should be left by themselves to defend against a sophisticated cyber adversary like Russia.

There are recommended standards. Yes, ma'am.

I believe there is work to be done. Yes, ma'am.

So we are not there now.

Telling people it will cost you $1,500 if you do not reveal very sensitive medical information, I think, stretches the bounds of what constitutes voluntary.

I have to say when you charge differentially, $1,500 or sometimes more, and that can happen because people do not want to reveal very sensitive, personal medical information.

Well, we have been tested on that numerous times and were never accused of discrimination during the 10-year life of the program.

I do not understand how that connects, then, with the rules on discrimination. It sounds a lot like discrimination.

So this is some really sensitive information, and it is supposed to be voluntary to hand it over.

Last year, Senator Enzi and I wrote and passed new legislation strengthening GINA protections so that personally identifiable genetic information collected through Federal research can never be made public.

The credit reporting agency is a threat to each of us personally, but it is also a threat to our national security.

Consumers should be able to control their own data, and without consumer control, credit reporting companies really have no reason to treat us well.

If companies like Equifax do not pay us to sell our information to other people, then we should not have to pay them to stop selling it.

I have introduced the FREE Act with Senator Schatz and more than a dozen other Senators.

The consumer should decide when to release that credit record information to others.

Taxpayers watch when we've granted exclusivity to these companies, and then they watch as the prices go up, and there's not a darned thing for taxpayers to do about it. This is just fundamentally wrong.

Your industry isn't based on competitive markets. It's based on totally artificial taxpayer granted monopolies.

I looked it up, and the organizations who are testifying here today spent a combined total of $30 million lobbying Congress last year.

But drug competition from Canada, price negotiation, are market solutions. They're not government mandates.

How about the Federal Government competing and actually having some competition and saying, 'We're going to negotiate prices.'

So you would be in favor of drug importation from any place that's not doing what you call price control?

Another market solution is negotiation. If the Federal Government were allowed to negotiate more competitive drug prices for Medicare beneficiaries, then prices would come down.

If the restrictions that prevent purchasers from importing the exact same drugs at lower prices from places like Canada were removed, we'd see some real competition, and we'd see some lower prices.