I am glad to hear that my friend from California, Mr. McKeon believes that competition between public and private is a good thing.

So, the way this is working now that an institution gets taxpayer money, lends it out, and then we pay them a premium on top of what the student would otherwise pay to reward them for taking a risk with our money? Is that essentially right?

The ranking member also in his opening statement talked about--he made an analogy to the auto industry. And it seems to me the analogy falls apart in that although we did advance a substantial amount of money to some auto industries, we…

To me, this is not only fiscally irresponsible, but downright immoral.

When someone else is paying the bills, costs always rise.

It is the height of irresponsibility to add to that liability; rather, you should be working to whittle it down.

the taxpayers are absorbing the risk of that capital not the person in the private sector.

I would say emphatically no to all those questions. That state laws aren't working, and they are not working because there is proof positive in Cedric's case that there was no communication evidently between Texas and Virginia.

I know it is sort of baked into the cake in our debates around here. The people say, well, let the states handle this problem. I don't think the states have done a terribly good job handling this problem.

I raise this issue because the chairman and a good chunk of the staff here is spending an inordinate amount of time on the health care reform issue, thank goodness, and this strikes me as yet one more compelling example of why we need…

What I am asking is, where does the treatment take place?