I have been on the Senate Health, Education and Labor Pension Committee for 18 years, and you know what, we have never had a larger meeting than this.

Safe staffing is not just some abstract concept. It literally improves patient care, keeps more nurses in the profession, and most importantly, saves lives.

Thank you, Chairman Sanders, for calling this hearing and giving me the chance to provide my testimony.

What the nurses have told me, and I have had the opportunity on several occasions to sit down and talk with these nurses, is that what this strike has everything to do with is the safety of their patients.

I want to thank all of the nurses who are in this room, the nurses who are watching this event on livestream, and the many, many nurses all over this country who put their lives on the line during COVID.

They tell me that they are stressed out. They are burnt out and are leaving the profession they love in droves because they are overworked, undervalued, and are forced each and every day to do more work with less resources.

I wanted to take a few minutes to share my thoughts regarding the horrific situation in Israel and Gaza. On October 7, Hamas terrorists waged a barbarous attack against Israel, killing over 1,400 innocent men, women, and children. Young…

I listened carefully to what Senator Scott and others have said about the barbarous acts committed by Hamas against innocent men, women, and children--the mowing down by machine guns of young people who were doing nothing more than…

The thing is that hundreds of thousands of women and children are living in desperation today. And nobody in the world can guarantee that a bottle of water may not go to somebody connected to Hamas. If you are insistent upon that, what you…

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record at the appropriate place the commitment letters for the Animal Drug User Fee Amendments of 2023 and the Animal Generic Drug User Fee Amendments of 2023. There being no objection, the…

What does one say to a person to say thank you for your tax dollars developing the drug, but I am sorry you can't afford the treatment you need to save your life.

Right now, we pay by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

The outrageously high cost of prescription drugs in America is a crisis and it must be addressed.

The status quo is not working. We need fundamental changes in the way that the NIH addresses the crisis of prescription drugs.

every treatment I have received was supported by NIH funded research

The health care system in our Country is broken and it is failing.

One out of four Americans cannot afford to pay for the medicine they need.

We pay for the research, drug companies develop the drug, they make billions, and then they charge us the highest prices in the world for the product.

Will you commit to us that you will work to make sure that Americans do not pay higher prices for prescription drugs in this country than people around the world?

We need a NIH Director who is prepared to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and use every tool at his or her disposal to substantially lower the outrageous cost of prescription drugs.

We spend almost twice as much per capita on health care as any other industrialized nation.

I applaud the Department of Energy very much for the work that they are doing.

It is a huge success story, significant reduction in their fuel bills.

As a result of energy efficiency and geothermal--and soon they're going to add solar--they have cut their fuel bills by 75 percent.

They are producing 90 percent of the electricity they require in a manufacturing facility.