It was so rewarding. Who got more out of this? It's a real toss-up.

We wanted to do more than send money. So we went and tore these people's homes down to the studs so they could have the insurers come in and see whether the house was worth rebuilding. But these people were rebuilding their lives.

It was pretty scary in the beginning. We were given gas masks and goggles and I remember thinking, what have we gotten ourselves into?

Our health care system is the finest in the world, but we still have too many uninsured Americans, too high prices for prescription drugs, and too many frivolous lawsuits driving our physicians out of state or out of business.

I think suicide is sort of like cancer was 50 years ago. People don't want to talk about it, they don't want to know about it. People are frightened of it, and they don't understand, when actually these issues are medically treatable.

I will say this about the truth - that it's one of those crisis rules, whether you are a client or someone who's living their life just every day - is that the truth has a funny way of not going away, and telling the truth is extremely important in dealing with any problem or crisis.