i'm michelle easton, president of the policy institute, and i want to welcome those of you here in washington and the millions in the c-span audience to our conservative woman's network lunch. it's such a pleasure every month for the policy institute to put on this conservative networking event with the heritage foundation, and bridget wagner every month. the purpose of the conservative woman's network event is to highlight the most outstanding conservative women in america. but our regular attendees know that every year in december we like to invite a distinguished gentleman, like senator coburn to speak. it's not because we don't like men, we do, rather, we believe that if conservatives fail to highlight our own conservative women we allow the left to supplant them with far less significant role models. it's now my pleasure to introduce senator tom coburn who was elected in november of 2004 as a citizen legislature, dr. coburn pledged to serve no more than two terms in the u.s. senate and to continue to care for his patients. prior to his election to the senate, dr. coburn represented oklahoma's second congressional district in the u.s. house of representatives from 1995 to 2001. he retired from congress to fulfill his pledge to serve no more than three terms in the house of representatives. senator coburn had a fascinating and full life in addition to holding elected office. he was raised in oklahoma and received a b.s. in accounting from oklahoma state university. and for eight years after that, he was a manufacturing manager of a division of coburn optical industries in colonial heights, virginia. after his family's business was sold he changed the course of his life by returning to school to become a physician. he became president of his class at the university of oklahoma medical school where he graduated in 1983. after internship and residency he returned to his hometown where he specialized in family medicine, obstetrics and allergies. dr. coburn and his associates serve more than 15,000 patients for whom he has also personally delivered almost 4,000 babies. dr. coburn and his wife have three children and four grandchildren. now when he was a member of the house of representatives dr. coburn was allowed to practice medicine on a not for profit basis, that means to earn enough to cover the cost, but not receive any profit. during this period he delivered more than 400 babies and he says that not one of the parents of the babies he delivered chose him hoping to sway his vote. before being sworn in as a member of the united states senate dr. coburn received a letter from the senate ethics committee advising him that such an arangement would be a violation of senate rules and a conflict of interest. and i hope that you'll tell us more about this saga, to prevent you from being a citizen legislature as all of our founding fathers were. his priorities in the senate include reducing wasteful spending, balancing the budget, improving health care access and affordability, protecting the sanctity of the unborn, and representing oklahoma values. he'll sign copies of his book "breach of trust" that you can purchase outside after his remarks and i'll also introduce john hart, his co-author, we're so happy to have you here. raise your hand, john. thank you for coming. and if you buy the book we'll give you a free copy of our 2006 great american conservative women calendar for the c-span audience you can get this on the website. or call our office. this is a great christmas gift. the book and the calendar. and i would recommend them. senator coburn is one of the most principled members of the united states congress on life on the importance of citizen legislators, immigration reform, pork barrel government spending, respect for our military, and all of the other issues that conservatives care the most about. won't you join me in welcoming senator coburn to speak about his wonderful book "breach of trust, how washington turns outsiders into insiders." [applause] >> thank you. well, it's a great day outside. you know, i feel real comfortable with this crowd. i have three grown daughters and i lived in a household for some 26 years with four women, so i got real used to women and about 70% of my practice is women and i've delivered 60 baby this is year. so i feel really comfortable in a group of women -- gentlemen, you'll please excuse me as i address my remarks to the women here. it is great to be with you. i'll spend some time on the book. i had a lot of angst on whether or not to write this book, because the book is highly critical of the process that we as americans have today in the congress. and that process originally intended was to put america first and politicians second. and what we've evolved into too often is a decisionmaking process that puts politician first and our country and the future generations second and third. and i honestly believe that if everybody in america knew what was inside the book that we'd have wholesale change in the way that our government operates and the way our elected officials vote in congress. and it's with that in mind they want to talk about a few things today about the book, but more importantly about the principles behind the book, because the book is just a book. it gives you information. what is important is the principles. congress is controlled, not by democrats nor republicans, it's controlled by careerism. it's controlled about protecting a political position and that is most often what comes first in decisionmaking processes. and that's nothing close to what our founders had in mind. yesterday i was on the floor and i won't name the individual, but we heard a very partison speech. and the speech was designed to be an attack. the speech was designed to undermine the integrity of those who had a different position. and that's the process that we see today, this polarization of political parties, not -- both don't have great ideas, but the idea is to make yourself look better, you have to make somebody else look bad. and i would tell you most of the people in the u.s. congress care a lot about this country, but they are human. we are all human. and the pressures that put perfect us, if what we want, we have to figure out what we want, and what we want gets confused and it's kind of like raising children. when you raise your children one of the things you want as a parent is to make sure their desires as they grow up through adulthood is balanced with realism and success and integrity and virtue, and to balance those desires. what has happened, i believe, is we had an imbalance in the desires and that's why we see people focused on the next election rather than on the next generation. and consequently we have seen tremendous changes take place in the last 25 to 30 years in our country that nobody would have foreseen. our founders certainly would not have foreseen it and our country can't tolerate it. i believe that the public is crying out for principle leadership. not republican leadership, not democrat leadership, not partison leadership, we are all americans. we're not a republican first or a conservative first or a liberal first, we're americans first. and if you know anything that's happening to us as a nation today in terms of our fiscal situation, we're on an unsustainable course. the youth in this room today is going to inherit the failings of us to think down the road because we're thinking about the next election rather than down the road as a group. we are going to be the first generations of americans, my generation, and to leave the next generation worse off unless major changes take place in our government and in our country in the next 10 to 12 years. and you can go to the g.a., robert walker is wonderful in terms what he's done, in terms of outlining our unsustainable course. the other thing they noticed is change only happens in congress when two things happen. one, the american people demand it. otherwise they'd become informed of what the problems are. and, two, when the pain of not changing is greater than the pain of changing. and that's a very tough criticism on our congress but it's an institution that we as individual citizens have allowed to become that way. because we have not -- and i'm talking to all americans, been vigilant in protecting the very institutions that are supposed to represent us and we've allowed a class of careerists to control that in both parties. and so so consequently what has happened is that the best interest of america is not put forward, but the best interest of politicians are put forward. people come here well intentioned and the addiction to this tremendous elickser of power changes the focus as we are all susceptible to and i believe that the reason -- the way you're different in that is not to want to be here in the first place. my decision to run for the senate was one of the most difficult decisions i've ever made in my life, because quite frankly, it wasn't something they wanted to do. and i came to the u.s. senate because i thought it was something that i should do, and not something they would enjoy doing, not something that i thought would be fun to do, but rather that i look at my grand children, and say, where is the leadership to change? where is the leadership to talk about calling out what's going to be in the future of our country? where's the clarity of that leadership? and where's the leadership that it's ok to lose? you know we have this leadership means that you win every time. it's not about winning every time, it's about putting forth a vision for america that sustainsous a path in this wonderful experience as a republic that gives us the benefit of freedom. it's not about the politicians individually winning. i would suspect that if you were to poll most people, the impression what most politicians think, it's about winning the individual battle or winning the race, or controlling the power or being the party in power. that's not what our founders had in mind. our founders had in mind a very clear vision of freedom that's based on a long-term vision for our country rather than a short-term political expedient vision. and to paraphrase some of what martin luther king had to say about it, he talked about vanity asked the question, is it popular? and they asked the question, is it expedient? but conscience asked the question, is it right? and it's not whether it's right now, it's, is it right for our country in the long term? i believe that there's a rumble in our country today, a rumble of discontent. you've seen all the stuff going on with the conflict of interest and all of the problems and working on the edge among politicians and going to the extreme limit of the law to accomplish those very goals of power and personality prestige and position. and i thank the focus is wrong. -- and i think that the focus is wrong. the focus has to be on the future, and the focus isn't on today, and the focus isn't in who is in power today, it's for the idea of the freedom of power for awful us as americans. i want to talk about ear marks because earmarking which ties into this political expedensy has caused the fiscal insustainability that we have. and the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts. earmarks themselves comprise only 3% of the federal budget. but they influence every other aspect of the budget process. ask yourselves with a supposed conservative republican congress over the last five years and a supposedly republican-controlled senate over the four -- or four out of the last six years, how is it that the federal government has grown by 35%? not counting mandatory expenditures, how did that happen? where was the need for that? for it to grow to that. at 2 1/2 to three times the rate of inflation. what happened there? earmarks happened. that's what happened. desire for a position, that's what happened. and not thinking long-term, that's what happened. earmarks and pork reflected an entire culture of spending that says it's admirable for politicians to turn financial capital into political capital for themselves and their re-election campaigns. unless we overcome the addiction to pork and earmarking that political power that says i can do something for my constituents and do that in a way, it's unlikely that we'll confront the fiscal challenges that face our country. pork is more than symbolic and the machinery of our democracy, it doesn't just grease the system, it's the lever and the crowbar used to move both large packages, spending bills, which would not otherwise move. give the size they are. and let me give you an example of how it works. let's say i want something for oklahoma and i put it in the bill. if i can get it in the bill and yet i don't vote for the bill, guess what happens the next time i want something for oklahoma? don't get it. so if i put a very small thing into a bill, $100,000 project, i'm voting for all the other $100,000 projects in 49 other states that may or may not be in terms of the pry ority of what we should do for our country. well, consequently, we vote for bills that we would never vote for because we're protecting a vested political interest back home and paying for vested political interest in every other state. and in the consequence of that, no one is watching the cash register and so we have seen this explosion in the earmarking process as a way to use political power to enhance and insure your own political position. and i believe that it's a corrupt process, not because the projects may not have merit, it's a corrupt process because it means the congress doesn't have to do the hard work of deciding the priorities of this country. and what you hear from member business of the senate and house, well, if we don't do this, the bureaucracy won't get it right. well, we have the position of making the bureaucracy smaller, and more responsive if we do oversight. and yet, if you look at the number of oversight hear nggets congress compared to all the -- they're miniscule. and why was i attacked so strongly when i spoke out for sculpture guard then washington state, or a parking garage in nebraska? or a dog kennel in new england? why was that? it's because you don't dare challenge in this political earmarking culture what one senator does in their state because you're open to be challenged for what you do in your state. well, it's easy for me to challenge it because i have asked for no earmarks and i ran an election on the basis that i would ask for no earmarks unless we're in surplus. if you're in surplus, you don't need to earmark anymore,, because we're running efficiently. and the other misnomer that is important and then i'll stop and we'll talk about anything that you want to talk about related to the book or any other area, people say -- it doesn't start until 1982. there were 12 earmarks in the transportation bill. this year earmarks will be, let's see, i think there's -- i got the number here somewhere but i can't find it. $27 billion. 14,000 earmarks and divide that by 535. that's 30-40 earmarks per every member of the house in the senate. we're tailing to do our job if we say that we have to micromanager where the money goes and we're not controlling the bureaucracy that says we have way too much government and we need to go down to the state and local level and let the individual citizens make those decisions. and unless we do that as well as control the other fixed entitlement programs, our childrens' children, my childrens' children, will have a limited opportunity for college education, and a limited opportunity for homeownership, and a very limited -- and with those thing, what happens to freedom and the attainment of individual goals in life? so we -- there's two philosophies in washington. one is very small that says that the government really does need to live within its means it. really does need to be responsive. it does need to not accomplish everything that the state governments were meant to accomplish the things for the states and the local government, and that we need to allow the freedom and capitalism to explode student, wealth, and future for our children and grandchildren. and we also know how to take care of everything and we're not going to look at the long-term problems, we'll look at the problems in front of us today only and we'll solve them by doling out pieces of things to make people happy. american people are starting to get it. they understand the system isn't working, the political system that we have today. and i would tell you that because the system we have today is built on earmarks that the polarization within congress is worse, not better. and my goal in the next two years is to eliminate all earmarks or to make it so painful to have an earmark that people decline to do it. and that means you have to defend your earmark on the floor of the u.s. senate. if you have an earmark, come to the floor and tell me why you should do that when people are sitting in the cold in new orleans in the rain today. there has to be an ordering of priorities and there has to be leadership that's identifying for the american public that we can do everything we want, every problem in front of us is solvable if we have visionary leadership that thinks of the long-term ahead of my political position. and if we'll have leadership stand up and start saying, no, i'm not going to do this and have the real debates -- the other thing that you see on c-span, you rarely have good solid debates on priorities and issues in the country. what you have are little sparrings that talks about it, but no wong talks about the long-term course of our country, the future of our country, where we're going and how we'll get there and how we'll solve these problems and how we'll compete in the global economy. and that means that the future of the country has to be put ahead of any one party and any one political career. and if -- that's what we need to demand. and you know what, this process will work positively for america, whether republicans are in control or democrats are in control, it's the visionary leadership that is down the road and not here. we all -- all will benefit. regardless of the political party that's in charge. all will. you hear the talks, starving the beast. starving the beast didn't work because republicans didn't stand by the very issues they said they'd stand for, we'll do tax cuts but control spending. so we did tax cuts and didn't control spending, so who is paying for the tax cuts today? your children and your grandchildren are paying. one last number, and then i'll close and we'll take questions. last year, this is an example of a lack of honesty that is coming out of washington. and if we can convict enron for fraud, we ought to be convicting everybody in washington for fraud. the national debt -- the debt that your children will children will pay back rose by $528 billion last year. you go in any government public organization, and they will talk about the deficit. which is one part of the set of the books. but they never talk the truth in numbers. and being an accountant by training, you know, you're taught to account for all the number, not the ones that help you. and all the numbers. and the fact is that that is a characteristic of the lack of leadership in washington, of being honest of the real problems in front of us, and the problems are severe, and they're not unsolvable and our hope is great, our future is great if we address the problems we have and do it from a position that says that the problem in our country is more important than anything about my political career. and when we have sacrificial leadership among our politically elected leaders we'll get back on course as a country and we'll get back the very reputation that we deserve, which is the greatest vibrant economy and source of freedom in the world. and with that, will come the integrity of the american experiment. with that, i'll answer any questions you have. thank you. [applause] >> what a great message, thank you so much. wouldn't you love to have several dozen more like him up there? we have little time for questions. we have a microphone. who has the mike? monique stewart here. and we'll ask you to give your name and affiliation. and senator, i'll let you select. raise your hands. >> ok. >> senator, first i want to thank you for coming to speak with us today. it was definitely very informative discussion. i am jason shea, and i'm here with the heritage foundation and i wanted to learn more about how conservatives address health issues. certainly with your background, you have some practical experience with that. my question ties into most of the discussion that you had surrounding the pork, and you touched briefly on it about new orleans. how do you think that all of this uncontrolled spending and pork addresses our nation's health and quality and access and cost? >> well, i think we have to get it right on health in our country and we're not. just some background, we're going to spend over $2.3 trillion in year on health care in this nation. that's $8,000 a person. that's 40% more than anybody else in the world spends per capita and if you look at our health attainment statistics we're not ahead of everybody. so if -- i think that the question we need to ask is how do we take $2.3 trillion or 18%, 19% of our economy and create a way where we can solve the health care problems for our society? and there's a lot of ways we do that. the first is the total failure on the part of a government for a legitimate role for the government. and there's only few legitimate roles that the government really has, according to the constitution, but one is prevention. to be a spokesperson on prevention. and we can save billions of dollars through prevention but we don't have leadership on prevecks today. how many of you can name the surgeon general? not many. how many remember the name c. everett koop? the difference is because we need a spokesperson talking about risk factors for colon cancer that can reduce it. we know that we can cut colon cancer in half. i'm a colon cancer survivor. we can cut diabetes in half. through dietary changes alone and supplements. through dietary changes alone and supplements. in the year 2070, 60% of medicare will be consumed with one disease -- diabetes. so if you wanted to cut that in half you would start now with prevention. and yet we have nobody thinking and talking about prevention. the second is, we don't have a true overall market-oriented health care system and we need a very transparent and open market for health care. the assumption is by those who have created multiple programs in health care is that you're not capable of making a market-oriented decision about your health care. and so we either transfered that to government or transfered that to third-party payers or in the instance if we had no insurance we transfer it ourselves, but we don't have a way out there to monitor quality and price in terms of a transitional and open and very transparent market. so you got to create that. the third is, we have not used i. it. . and the reason we haven't used i.t. is because we have an incent vise, one, and we don't have an interoperateability characterist toik use it, and we have innovation in i.t. and they are afraid that the standards will cost them more money. and so i.t. is another -- the fourth is to reward excellence. reward and the only way to do that is to have a slizzible market to say this person is great. this one is so, so and if you disguise where you want to go beyond relationship and the art of medicine you want to look, what is the outcome, what is quality and what is price? and that aspect of the market. and the other, there's not an international market for pharmaceuticals. it's a price-controlled market everywhere except in this country. and so consequently we pay 50% more than everybody else in the world for our drugs, and we are subsidizing 90% of the world's research on drugs and we just made the largest mistake that i believe will have been made in the last 50 years in this country, and that's medicare part d. it's going to cost $50 billion next year of which we have no money for, and it's going to consume $8.7 trillion between now and 2050. $8.7 trillion. the deficit associated with the medicare part d. is greater than the social security unfunded liability. i mean, it's unbelievable. and that goes back to the orjins of my talk. why did we solve the drug problem? was it that people weren't getting drugs? only one out of every 15 people will be helped that are seniors that are needing it, one out of 15. the other 14 grping to get their drugs and had a payment mechanism to get it. why is that created? it was to take the debate over the pharmaceutical prices in this country out of the election in 2004. that's the reason it was done. people won't be honest with you and say. that they'll say, well, we're taking care of it. how do we steal from one generation and give to another without blinking an eye and say we did it because it needed to be done? competition will force. that the downside of that is that everybody that doesn't get a medicare part d. drug, your prices for your pharmaceuticals will go up. so not only did it increase the deficit, you got a tax. because you're going to pay a tax for a much higher price for every pharmaceutical that you buy in the future because that is how we'll subsidize the portion as it grows. so that's the way it hit americans, for everybody that sent part of that program. and then, finally, we need to have common sense liability reform. that is associated with really taking care of those people who are injured in health care, and it happens. it's because physicians are human. but we don't need it gained like it is today. and we need people who are injured to get the benefits of it, and not the trial bar in between, and this is not an anti-trial bar. we need a trial bar to hold physicians accountable, but what we have is a process of extortion going on now that says sue though we know there's not something there and so they will settle so they won't have to spend the moneys to defend the suit and that's pure extortion. so we need the trial bar, but on legitimate base claims where there's true injury and we need arbitration and good panels, and if someone is severely damaged they need to be paid and compensated for it. but those are the five things that i'll do, and we won't solve these problems until we address health care and i plan on doing that this next year. next question? i was going to ask her to throw it to you. >> thank you for being with us, senator. >> glad to be here. >> i just talked to some people this morning and they're backing the challenge against chaffey. since you're renound for your candor, what you think of the challenges for republicans as a tool to get them to look down the road? >> let me answer the question this way -- i believe that, first of all, i was in a primary with three people and i came in march and the election was in july. so you don't have to be in a race forever to win a race. that's number one. traditional political thinking, we need more political party, that's one thing they think. we need more choices when we go to the ballot box. and i think that we need more grassroots involvement in every election and we ought to try to figure out how to incent vise that and if we had an information squout flow we would do that. -- information outflow we doled that. people ought to be what they say they are. and i look at the republican platform and i pretty well line up with most of it. and i would say if you measured votes in the u.s. senate and measured the party platform you might not think that people lined up if you looked at the results of it. and so the other thing is having an integrity of being who you are and saying who you are and then acting who you are. and lincoln chaffee is a nice man but not a conservative and if the people in that state want to have a conservative to represent them, they ought to vote for a conservative. if they don't, they shouldn't. the point is, we haven't be involved in that. those people ought to decide what they want. but we ought to be truthful about who we are. i said in my race two terms is max. i won't bring something home until we're in surplus. i was very honest about it. i was asked what i wanted to be known for as a senator and i said, i don't want to be known. the point is that it can't be about us anymore. if it's about us we revert back to the process of the what's wrong with the whole thing now. we make the politicians the center rather than the ideas and the principles as the center. we should measure politicians, are you voting the principles that you campaigned on? and the prells would do a wonderful job for this country if they took every vote every week and put it in the paper and said, here's campaign rhetoric, and here's the vote and here's what this vote did. don't do an editorial comment on it. say, here's what was said in the campaign, here's the vote, and here's what the vote was about, and let the american people see who is voting for what and why. and then let us be question body how we vote. let's -- questioned about how we vote. and we have this polarization in the press, on social issues and everything else, you can't read one journal anymore and get a common sense value of what's the truth. you got to read both sides because the truth is often somewhere in between. and so one of the very necessities of a free republic is to have a vibrant press and what i found is the wloggers are taking over in terms of getting something. it's not always accurate, but to get something that is somewhat based on fact rather than on innuendo or journalistic editorializing. and so, you know, i've got all i can handle in oklahoma. i don't need to be running races somewhere else. i do believe -- i would say that i don't believe politicians ought to be picking for their state who runs for office. that's the other problem we have, we have this kind of hand me down political power, i'm going to endorse you to get you into this position because you've been helpful to me. we ought to have wide open, we need doctors, we need teachers, and we need firemen, people who come from real walks of life that have been out there and done lots of other stuff and haven't been in politics coming up here. what is happening is like what we're seeing, the price that you come up here with, is high by default. and we need those who won't play the game. and we need -- we need the idea -- it's ok to be wrong, and it's ok to lose, but it's not ok to be truthful about what you believe in. and my best dealings in the house were with barney frank. and the reason that it was is because i knew what he stood for and he was true to his heart on why he believed what he believed. so you can deal with people who are intellectually honest about what they believe. next question? or is everybody going to pack in for the snow? >> here, bridget has one. >> matt. >> ok, matt. >> i'm matthew spalding here from the heritage foundation. i commend your efforts going after earmarks, i think you're right, it's a small sliver but it's a great sign of a growing corruption in congress. my question is this -- when in the 1980's there's small numbers of earmarks we had a president willing to veto legislation and yet we have a president that won't veto anything, which is to say an executive not playing his role in checking congress. that strikes me as a very big problem, the interest of the branches aren't checking each other and balancing each other such that they can -- now they can get away with with these things they couldn't before. how do we restore a sense of responsibility so that we -- it's in the interest of legislators to keep an eye on the president, and the president to keep an eye on the legislature as well? >> i think that's a very fair criticism. there was an article, an interview with josh bolten this last week where he denied that there's a problem with discretionary spending. we had 21 hearings this last year on the federal financial management oversight and i would say after the first 16 we could probably give you $100 billion of waste, fraud and abuse by -- after looking at 40% of the government. just 40%. and so you can't fix a problem if you deny the problem is there. i believe that they're not in tune. it is true, the mandatory spending problems and their projections are things that are going to be very difficult for us. but it's not true that we don't have tremendous waste, duplication and fraud in that $800 million, $900 billion in the government that is discretionary. i said i'll vote for a tax increase as soon as we clean up the government. but i won't until we have gotten rid of the waste, fraud and abuse. so i believe that they're focusing on the wrong problem, they're fixing the wrong problem. you can't fix the big things until you're willing to fix the small things and you have credibility with the american people. you know, people are squirming because of the labor bill isn't going to grow this year, but it's grown 30% in the last four years. you know, 2 1/2 times inflation rate. and, you know, we can't sustain this. so what is going to happen? one of two things. we'll either elect new people to represent us in this country who will make the hard choices and pay the prices. or we'll we're going to go broke. we're going to go broke. and then the heritage that we will leave will be an unsustainable heritage of lack of progress, lack of economic growth, and it will be soon that it will be out of our hands. the international financial community within the next 10 years, if we don't make the tough decisions, the decision to prioritize our expenditures in this government, the financial community will do it for us in terms of the value of the dollar. so we should fix it. and that requires courage and that requires -- you know, can we do everything that pleases people every time? if the situation says i can't do it, franklin roosevelt cut discretionary spending in 1939, because he knew that he had to be prepared for what was going on in europe in terms of supporting that. 22%. he just cut it. in one year. he led. and that's what we have to have, we need visionary leadership of character in this country. and i believe that president bush has all the character in the world. i believe what is lacking is a vision to lead our nation and the problems that will face us and we need to do the problems -- solving the problems today that will face us tomorrow rather than not addressing those. and he tried on social security. and what happened? we let the political system, and what didn't happen on social security is the plan is that you can have everything you had before and you can have it guaranteed and nobody gets less and we can solve the problem. but that wasn't what was heard. and so we have to be good spokespersons for the vision that we have as well as just having the vision, you got to be out there and promote it. i think there's a lot of stuff that should be vetoed. the defense department is way overdue for a good -- well, let's say lethargeic, there's so much waste in the defense department with performance bid contracts and lack of accountability and we say defense because that's kind of protected but at the same time if we're wasting money on defense that's money that could go for a better defense. and we have to start looking at opportunity costs of not doing the right thing. in terms of oversight. and you don't see the oversight. and the american people need the demand that we start looking at everything. there should be 3,000 oversight hearings next year in the congress. where every aspect of everything in the federal government is looked at. the malaria program, $90 million expended. $4 million got to patients. $4 million got to help people with malaria. $86 million got consumed by the bureaucracy. a million kids a year die in africa, a million kids under 4 die in africa a year from a disease that is preventable for $2, and we had an organization usid that spent 90% of its money on bureaucracy and 10% in terms of helping people with the disease. i'd say, shut it down. let's just send them the $90 million and i bet that the african nation accuse do better than that. so the point is that oversight reveals sunshine that can cause us to act. all of these things that we've done we're sending to everybody in congress, these 21 oversight hearings. we're sending it to the head of both appropriations committee and the subcommittee chairman. here's the data, here's what's wrong, here's what needs to be fixed and we'll see. we have improper payments law that half the federal government doesn't respond to. it must have been on the books since 2001 i think or before. that you have to report your improper payments, that half the agencies just go, we just won't do it. i mean, you know, there's no accountability and that's congress' problem. congress should have addressed that. and so we need to have oversight and we need to hold members of congress accountable if they don't have oversight. if you're not going to have oversight, don't be up here. it's hard work. last question. or next to last. >> senator, i'm -- >> say that three times quickly. >> i admire your decision to impose term limits on yourself as a public servant. i understand though that congressional leadership and leadership within the party is often tied to the number of terms that a legislator serves and how long he or she has been in office. how can you help us to feel good about your decision without feeling like we're losing hope in having a