Peter Welch

If we negotiated the price of drugs, we'd save $300 billion a year.

Sitting on the sidelines, which has essentially been the approach we have taken, is not working.

There are a lot of folks on both sides of the aisle who want to bring these costs down, because all of us have consumers that are getting hammered.

The status quo is just killing us.

We embraced the challenge on a bipartisan basis.

Are we going to show us the money in rural America.

There has got to be money just like there was with rural electrification.

No funding, no broadband. It is as simple as that.

We want infrastructure funding that is real so that there is broadband in rural America.

There is no economic future for any part of our country if it doesn't have high speed internet.

We know about 40 percent of rural America has no broadband. Not slow broadband, no broadband.

I think we need to do something as a committee. That is a very compelling loss.

Energy efficiency, incredibly important, enormous bipartisan support for it on this committee.

Let's see if we can do something.

You are telling me that full speed ahead on meeting the standards, not a detour to slow walking the standards or not implementing them altogether.

I am one of the lead sponsors.

Has a company in your organizational group, ever paid another company in return for not bringing their competing product to the market?

Have you ever heard the term evergreening?

Is it the case that at the end of that patent period that it is something given by public policy as incentive for doing the research any of your member companies have used legal maneuvers to extend that period of original exclusivity in…

That product for which you got a patent is something over which you control the price, correct?

They have no restraints on what they can do?

It is about the lack of restraint and the pricing power that the pharma industry has that is resulting in immense heartache for families.

We are going to have a tough time in Congress on money.

I think all of us should leave this hearing with some significant amount of humility.

I think we need, those of us who represent rural America, some concrete build-out rules that can give us concrete confidence that somehow, some way, the system is going to serve rural America.