Ron Wyden

I want to make sure Senator Casey gets a chance to speak.

This was a special priority of mine.

There's no question the SNAP program has had success in reducing hunger and food insecurity for many families across the Nation.

It would be wrong to deny a child access to foster care when she is being abused and neglected just for the sake of scientifically evaluating the effects of foster care against a control group.

Congress ought to be finding ways to build in that type of continuous program improvement.

This is a great opportunity to dig into an issue that really should be an underpinning of the work Congress does every day.

So if I was explaining this at a town hall meeting, what I would say is that I can use this inventory to find programs that seem particularly promising in terms of earnings and employment.

Now, I understand that you all are advocating some sort of inventory for information that you think is most promising to help these youngsters.

My hope is that we will be able to make significant progress on that even before the end of the session.

The focus of that approach should be breaking health care, social service programs, and law enforcement out of their individual silos and bringing them together in a coordinated system.

That's why this committee, working in conjunction with others including HELP and Judiciary, must develop a fresh approach for protecting and caring for Americans with mental illness.

Mr. Chairman, I very much look forward to working with you and our colleagues.

I think that is one of the reasons we are so interested in fundamental change and ensuring that everybody knows where to go.

So in Oregon, we sought to try to break some new ground here in terms of trying to define different relationships between law enforcement and mental health.

But there are several pieces to this issue. There is prevention, better coordinating the services, and obviously--again, in Oregon, we have tried to highlight the relationship between law enforcement and mental health services, and it is…

Again, this just seems to be an area that is being missed, and it is not some partisan thing, it is just being missed.

I have been really struck by how negative perceptions about serious mental illnesses are actually growing.

Senator Stabenow is here. She has been a champion on these mental health issues.

Because of the lack of appropriate places to meet the needs of those with these mental health challenges, we so often have patients boarded in emergency rooms or in fights with police.

My brother struggled with schizophrenia for decades, and he had a lot of his health-care bills covered by Medicaid.

The Finance Committee is responsible for the programs--Medicare and Medicaid--that spend more on mental health than any others in America.

Ranking Member Wyden's cost recovery proposal released on April 26, 2016, would appropriately retain current-law like-kind exchange rules for real property.

The cost recovery legislation proposed by current Finance Committee Ranking Member Wyden on April 26, 2016, would leave the depreciation of multifamily property at 27.5 years.

We thank Chairman Orrin Hatch and Ranking Member Ron Wyden for holding this hearing.

For small, cash-strapped firms to grow and create jobs, they need to invest in basic things like new cash registers, office computers, or farm equipment when it makes business sense--not when it makes tax sense.