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Underperforming hospitals or units should accept that they have to improve the service they offer or that patients, quite properly, will go elsewhere.

We want to make sure that we incentivize the health care system to be designed to provide you the best quality health care possible.

Ever since Katrina, there has been a proliferation of efforts at the state level and among hospital administrators to come up with guidelines that would help professionals stuck in a situation like this to prioritize patients. These are questions of values much more than they are of medicine or nursing. They're the province of everybody.

Hospitals are about healing.

By training and keeping doctors in underserved areas, we're working toward a goal of increasing access to quality health care for more of our communities.

We have the greatest hospitals, doctors, and medical technology in the world - we need to make them accessible to every American.

In turn, more physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers are severely limiting their practices, moving to other states, or simply not providing care.

Where patient needs are complex, we should provide greater support in the community so that patients can cut down on trips to the tertiary hospital.

But, also, before I even go on the Medicare prescription drug debate, I always tell the folks in rural Illinois, and I represent 30 counties south of Springfield down to Indiana and Kentucky, that in this bill is the best rural package for hospitals ever passed.