We should be taking, in my view, a hard look at why we are, through Medicare, providing $10 billion a year to training hospitals without really knowing what they are producing in terms of primary care physicians.

I want to thank Senator Sanders, who has been a major supporter of the FQHC model of health care delivery in Vermont.

We have a lot of work to do. Let's get going.

1 in 5 Americans lives in an area where there are too few primary care providers.

The AAMC applauds subcommittee Chair Bernie Sanders and Ranking Member Richard Burr for continuing their attention to the gaps in access.

So what you are telling us is that the need is out there.

Instituting major reforms in primary care and enabling people to see a doctor when they need one will save lives.

According to HRSA, we need 16,000 more primary care practitioners to meet the needs that exist today.

If we located a community health center in every community in rural or urban America that actually is medically underserved and needed it, that is going to cost us a bit of change.

We spend $10 billion a year providing support to training hospitals, and we don't even know who they are graduating.

By 2025, we will need over 50,000 new primary care physicians.

We are losing tens of thousands of people every single year who die because they do not get to a doctor.

I think we need more information from the BLS so that we can, as policymakers and the American people, get a real understanding of what is going on in the economy, so we can come up with policy to address the problems.

Will you work with me under the concept of a Genuine Progress Indicator which tries to measure how the economy is, in fact, doing for the average person dealing with real wages, dealing with distribution of wealth and income?

as the Chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, one of my top priorities is to honor the promise that we made, as a nation, to care for veterans and their survivors. The Senate recently passed a resolution, which I was proud to…

If there is anything that many of us have learned in recent years, it is that the real cost of war is far, far greater than simply paying for the tanks and guns and planes and the manpower to fight those wars.

I want to work with you to expand those concepts, to be more aggressive, because I think you have a lot of folks out there who are concerned about overmedication, the ways that we can deal with pain without a lot of drugs, et cetera.

I believe you established that goal not long after you took your position.

That may be true, and correct me if I am wrong. If somebody is a well trained, qualified acupuncturist, for example--that person as an acupuncturist as opposed to, say, being an M.D. who practices acupuncture--that acupuncturist, himself…

At a time when too many Americans and people in my own State of Vermont are sleeping out in the streets or in their cars, the VA has undertaken an aggressive and successful effort to significantly reduce the number of homeless veterans in…

In terms of health care, in a nation with over 45 million people lacking any health insurance and at a time when the cost of health care in this country is far higher than any other country on earth, the VA is recognized by many as…

You brought forth a very, very ambitious goal, and you said that you wanted to process all claims in 125 days and with a 98 percent accuracy by 2015.

I think that one of the crucial parts of helping that to filter down is something that we are also engaged in, and that is research to demonstrate the efficacy in specific circumstances of certain alternative medicine therapies.

We now understand that the cost of war includes significant care not only for those who lost their legs and their arms and their eyesight but for those who came home with what we now call the invisible wounds of war.

I do think man-made emissions contribute to global warming, yes.