Of the Obama Administration. Held by the Consumer Federation of america, this is about two hours and 15 minutes. Good morning. Welcome. My name is thomas, the director of the Food Policy Institute and Consumer Federation of america and i would like to welcome you and thank you for attending our 40th annual National Food policy conference. Today is also the second day of the jewish passover holiday, so i would like to say happy passover. As many of you know, Consumer Federation of america is an association of nearly 300 nonprofit consumer organizatio organizations. We were established in 1968 to advance the consumer interest through research, education and advocacy. And with focus on a lot of different Consumer Protection topics, but particularly relevant to this conference, we do food safety, nutrition and agricultural policy. So this Conference Provides an opportunity to hear from some of the key policymakers and players in the food policy world. Opportunity to explore food policy fro
Support. I want to give the congressman a chance to respond. The American People are ned concerned. I think when incidents like what happened in San Bernardino, americans are frightened and they like to their leaders for answers. Ane i think the initial response, my republican colleagues was to go after the refugee program. Thats the panacea, denyingun women and children and old men i and women fromng coming to the United States, who are looking for refuge. That really is not addressing the issue. Getg i think what democrats are focusing on and we had from the get go is a visa waiver program, which weve taken action on in a bipartisan way, a more he thoughtful way and i think also the issue of addressing the issue of access to weapons by terrorists. Weapo by keeping them from getting those weapons the terrorism watch list by a means as to who can purchase weapons. People i recognize the feelings there. The first reasonability of the president and congress is to protect the American Peo
This is one of those numbers everyone is going to commit to memory. The firstterm senators running in single obama states will stop one of the things we have two absolutely look at is when we look at the way the senate is going to be operating, or at least the way senator mcconnell envisions the senate operating, we dont know how this experiment is going to work. The macconnell doctrine appears to be a return to what we used to call regular order where you process bills through committee. He actually got a laugh from the press yesterday. He held a News Conference yesterday afternoon at i am not kidding the elaine chao auditorium at the Mcconnell Center on the campus of louisville. Was there that role earmarking involved . Got a laugh line from the press when he said something to the effect of believe it or not, the committees have to function. When bills come out of committee on a bipartisan basis, those bills should actually come to the floor. They have been talking about bringing bac
Bush nixon, president , republican and democrat, president clinton the conversation about how we make this next step forward with regard to reducing uninsured is something that we struggled with as a nation. And this is the first time, and someone reflected on the anniversary of medicare, and that 50 year anniversary. This is the first time that we have seen that. So the land that we have in place, the implementation of the Affordable Care act has done that, but we have not seen any alternative. Let me talk about chip. I want to emphasize again that we have to act on this legislation immediately when we consider sgr which expires at the end of march. While funding may not expire until the end of september for chip more than half by june 1. So its clear the Congress Needs to act swiftly to ensure states can budget appropriately for chip and avoid any disrussian in childrens coverage. I see no reason why congress cant act very soon. Can you comment on the impact on states if the chip fun
Talking about what this is Precision Medicine or personalized medicine is getting the information so that we can do treatments that are to the individual. I was at nih recently had the opportunity to both see the tumors and meet the cancer patient of a Kidney Cancer patient where he had had a group of tumors removed. They came back. But then, using Precision Medicine, which meant looking specifically at the genetic makeup of his tumors, they could be treated in a different way. I met him. That happened months ago, and now he the patient was there, discussing with me and is in a very different place. So one that large database. Two, specifically focussing on the area of cancer because we already are seeing some progress there, and we believe that place is ripe for it. The other thing we need to do is fda, make sure that as we think about Precision Medicine we regulate and think about how to approve these things in ways of a different type of medicine. And then finally, we need the Healt