and finally, let me just reiterate our thanks to our informal advisory board chaired by john rother from the national commission coalition on health care, who is also a member of our board. there is a sheet describing those folks in your material, and each of them played a big role in shaping the series itself, both the content and the format in a way that we hope will help. i'm pleased and fortunate to have guiding us through this entire series susan denser of health affairs, who i will not say anything nice about, because you know all the good things about her. we're just happy that she's here to make sure that everybody gets a chance to make the contribution that they're capable of doing. susan, let me turn it over to you and have a great discussion. >> thank you very much, ed. good morning to all of you, and welcome back to work. those of you who were at our first session will know that when we open up a conversation about health care costs, it's very difficult to confine that conversation to a couple of discrete contributors for health care costs. we tried to do that in the first se