questions to speak about the secretary azar: thank you. good afternoon, everyone. president said earlier we need to put america's patients first and not take advantage of them. i want to put a frame together for the actions you will see in and what the, president and i talked about today so you have a sense of where we are going here. problems, highor list prices for drugs, andrnment rules that teddy the way of plans getting good deals for our senior citizens in our medicare programs. the third is foreign countries free writing off american innovation and the fourth is -- high,et out-of-pocket costs especially for our seniors. the administration has already made a lot of progress. the fda has approved more generic drugs than ever before $8.8 billionaving in the first year. we changed medicare reimbursement rules to bring for out of pocket spending senior citizens, saving them $320 million out of pocket for the drugs they by each year. work we ared the laying out now is focused on four strategies. to help fix this complex problem we face. first. increased competition, third, incentives to lower list prices and forth, lowering out-of-pocket costs. it is crucial we have more competition in prescription drug markets. that means we need a vital generic drug industry and generic drug market. we need to nurture a new competitive generic drugthat me, generics for those complex, expensive biologic medicines. we need to foster and nurture that. we have to get after pharma companies that engage in anticompetitive practices and try to block the entry of generics or bio similar products to market, like for instance blocking access to their products so they can't do studies they need to do in order affordableoval of an generic or bio similar product. bring morehave to private sector negotiation to our medicare program to get the best deals. the part d discount program is now 15 years old. created it there when we and it is still a great program the best at negotiating great deals for our senior citizens and was really able to drive tight formularies that were very efficient and that is what kept that part d drug plan cost below forecast. so often15 years, as happens with government programs, it got frozen in place, and the private sector kept adapting and learning, especially after the economic crisis of 2007, how to control drug spending even better. part d stayed static. the same toolsg available to the private sector sothose part d drug programs they can drive great deals for our seniors. we also have part b, these are drugs the physician administers. paid right now are basically on a list price, plus a markup read there is no negotiation involved in that it all, and the president has proposed, we have got to figure out a way to move those drugs, especially the high cost ones, into the part d negotiations so that we can start getting bargains on that for our seniors and taxpayers. look at other mechanisms and you will see some other ones in the blueprint that also help us negotiate better deals. and this is a complex area. right now we have to bring incentives to lower list drug prices. incentive inery the system is to increase and have high list drug prices, because everybody in the system except the patient and taxpayer is wetting their beak along the way. they are getting a percent of that list price. everybody makes more money along math just works that way. we need to flip the incentives so that it financially makes less sense to increase prices. one of the things we are going indo, i talked about this the rose garden, is we are that you have to -- disclose the list price of your drug. if the patient is having a discussion with a doctor about a drive, telling them all the good do, it ist drug can relevant to know if it is a $50,000 drug or a $100,000 drop, because often the patient is