mrs. sebelius where she starts. she starts with her father.i start with my three 6th graders, and as i listen to the list of everything happening, all these wonderful things that happened so far, this magical $250 check go out to the seniors before the election and this 50% discount now on name brand drugs, free annual wellness check, and all i could think of is who pays for it? that's my kids. that probably drives me here. it's interesting these three 6th graders started to read more. they read "animal farm," and it struck me in the mrs. sebelius's testimony about the ipab as a backstop or a fail safe, and i have no idea what that means. i think i know what it might mean. what i think it means is that it is a committee that is set up to do what the administration wants to do if congress will do it on their own, and all of her testimony i think was partially correct. we heard her talk about the process, about the ipab making recommendations on the growth rates, but the final decision goes to congress. what she didn't say was that ipab makes th

mr. chairman. secretary sebelius, nice to see you again. i want to talk about competition and the effect of competition, as it relates to health care. potential for competition to reduce cost depend on a fully informed, fully free negotiation on both sides? >> usually that is what a market strategy is. >> and with regard to medicare part d, i think virtually everyone had the same experience i did, that my constituents for a long time were extremely confused, and many are still confused about what their choices are under the prescription drug program. is that likely, assuming we were to enact the republican proposal, that this would be an enormous problem for america's seniors, to be in a position to intelligently repeat what the insurance companies approach to marketing is? >> what we have done in the past two years, and some of the medicare part b programs, and medicare advantage, is try to eliminate programs that have very little differential but just add more confusion to the marketplace, to do just that. yes, i think it is not un- compl

mr. speaker, this obamacare $23.6 billion that's sitting there being implemented. and with -- with kathleen sebelius, with the correction -- discretion to spend that and send it down -- send the roots down, expand the defendency class, here's an example. one of those examples is this. they advertise that we need to do obamacare because we had so many people that had pre-existing conditions and they would be refused for insurance so when they were refused, they didn't have any way to get health insurance. and that it was a human tragedy. so these huge numbers of people that were uninsurable were going to be brought in to the fold of the new obamacare under the pre-existing conditions language that already is law. but a month or so ago they discovered that, in spite of how hard they tried to recruit people with pre-existing conditions, and i remind you we have 306 million people in america. and of those 306 million people, the numbers were supposed to be large, impressive, maybe not astronomical of those who had pre-existing conditions and could not buy insurance. and what they found were, they could