to yield the floor the distinguished chair of the committee on energy and commerce , chairman frank pallone. pallone: let me just say that i'm excited today because what we are doing can help the average american. i want to thank nancy in particular because of those out to seeys looking what we can do it not only as democrats but congress to see how we can help people unit their daily lives. drug prices are out of control. that is true. i want to stress the status quo is unacceptable. something needs to be done. we will do it. is druglem right now companies basically charge whatever they want. unless there is generic competition, which we encourage, they basically do what they want and have a monopoly. actuallyr countries have their government negotiating prices on behalf of their constituents and as a result the prices are much less than a lot of the developed countries in the world. we subsidize the other countries , which is wrong. we need to give the authority to the government. in this case the department of human -- health and human services to negotiate prices. so what do we do? firs

and chairman neal and frank pallone and bobby scott in the education and labor committee. this is very, very important. and some of you heard me say on the campaign trial, i have seen and see how an cry debilitating it is. so we continue to move forward on meeting the needs of the american people and making progress for them and that is what is important to them, what we do and how it effects their daily lives. that's our responsibility. we take an oath to protect and defend the constitution. thank you. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org

and my chairman, frank pallone, who is the chairman of the energy and commerce committee that has jurisdictiontrying to get the fda to tell us when they're going to take action on this. and it just hasn't happened. >> and you know, you tweeted on wednesday. i don't often agree with the trump administration, but on this i do. the flavored nicotine products are causing real harm to the health of our children. so this step is about banning the flavored ones, which is particularly about protecting children. so they're not tempted to feel like this is just another form of candy. is that enough? >> no. the other thing we need to do, we need to raise the smoking age to 21. >> to cover both old-school kig s cigarettes and this kind of thing. >> i have been working on this for some number of years and what the data shows is, if you say that you are targeting 18-year-olds, really the industry is marketing to 15, 16, 17-year-olds. so if you raise the smoking age to 21, then that eliminates the marketing to those very vulnerable high school and middle school kids. >> juul was going into schools. i want to