Jim McDermott

He led the House with fairness and comity, a style of leadership we haven't seen.

He appreciated the role of the House in our balanced structure of government.

He believed in the Congress, and he believed that this institution could produce positive results for the American people.

He believed that the Speaker was the Speaker for the whole House, and he lived that to his very core.

Our ability now to produce manufactured goods and that sort of thing is--we are in real competition around the world.

As we often hear, budgets are moral documents. They are a statement by a country about what they want their future to be and where they are going to spend their resources.

A huge amount of what happens in our innovation and our research and development, R&D as it is called, is from the Federal Government.

But the real damage of the sequester is that it affects the long-term investments in research that this country does.

I would like for the committee, that you would submit to us, all of you, if you have it, evidence that backs up the theory that people go to the doctor more often than they need to.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I want to say I have appreciated your slow gavel so that we could allow the witnesses to finish what they have to say.

I look forward to this process.

If you shift the cost to beneficiaries, how does that get paid for?

I don't think there is general agreement across this dais, I am sure, on the need for catastrophic limit.

Republicans often assert that Medicare is outdated and needs reform, and I agree.

So I think it is generally accepted by everyone that whatever manipulation you do, you have to take care of the people at the bottom.

My point is, Mr. Chairman, patients don't shop, they follow what doctors tell them to do.

Is that high enough?

For anybody to start putting those kind of prescriptions into law really don't make sense to me.

I can't understand. Is it we are sort of softening them up for the fact that they are going to get clipped?

You got to be the Vice Chair of the charitable giving working group. Congratulations.

I heard from the president of Seattle University. And he said to me, 'Jim, our charitable deductions will drop, we figure, by at least 40 percent if you start fooling around with the limits that are in the law today.'

I always try to figure out what these hearings are about. I don't know whether the purpose was to panic the charitable community into rushing to Washington to talk about what their deductions are all about.

When we don't pay our debts, they stop hiring.

If you pass a law, even the threat of passing the law, under the Clinton administration, suddenly health care costs kind of leveled off.

And it seems to me that the issue really here is whether we are going to tear the safety net out, say to seniors, we are not going to cover you.