Barbara Mikulski

I look forward to working with you on a clear set of rules of the game, reform and maintaining choice and opportunity but not profiteering and gouging.

I don't want that to turn into a hollow opportunity.

I believe that higher education is a very important right in our country.

We need to make sure that we have a set of rules for who we help that doesn't add to student debt.

I am apprehensive that maybe we are going to need a larger standing Army to not only meet unintended things in the world.

We could always buy more equipment, but you cannot always buy more troops as if you can pull them in off the shelf.

I just want to echo your remarks and that of the ranking member in thanking both Secretary McHugh and General Dempsey for all that they do to keep our country safe and to keep our troops safe.

But conditions are changing. They are changing by the tweet.

Thank you for organizing today's hearing on public health, medical, and bioterrorism preparedness.

So while we're busy--You know, we like to pound our chest and come up with all kinds of things in education to encourage people for science, but our young people are going in it, but they need opportunity, both in the public as well as in…

I must say both the chairman and the ranking member were enormously supported to minimize the disaster, but it was not a victory.

You broke the code and we invented--not only mapped the code, but came up with new fields called computational biology, bioinformatics.

I'm very proud of the fact that NIH is located in the State of Maryland.

You were the guy who broke the AIDS code.

Well, I think this would be enormously useful to this subcommittee, Mr. Chairman, because, as you know, this is a topic--a big public-policy topic they ponder all of the time.

They often get a stigma, 'oh that is the charity hospital, that is where the poor go.'

I think we need to confirm Dr. Berwick and stop fooling around here because under his leadership, the most important healthcare finance officers in America work.

I think it is a national waste that we don't have this man confirmed.

In your quest to be the very best and to improve the methodologies of quality, was the government of any help to you?

Your practices came out of our quality initiatives and our national health effort through the Patient Protection and Affordable Patient Care Act.

This might be the last billion you get, unless we really show results. That is not a threat, it is an analysis.

I know my time is up, but to my colleagues, Senator Harkin and Enzi, and others, if you live in Baltimore, you have Hopkins, you have University of Maryland.

While you got high tech and high touch, you didn't get a lot of information when you were ready to leave about what you needed to do to comply with the medical regime.

One of the big things we want to improve is health outcomes for patients. That is our large, bipartisan, public policy goal.

Essentially the intervention is relatively low tech, as Senator Mikulski noted.