[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 141 (Thursday, August 23, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5874-S5875]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Healthcare Research

  Mr. BLUNT. Madam President, we will vote in a few minutes to move 
forward with the Defense, Labor, HHS, and Education appropriations 
bill.
  That probably sounds like a pretty unusual combination, even though I 
think most voters, most taxpayers, understand that to get this work 
done in the timeframe we have to do it, we generally need to bring more 
than one topic together on the floor at the same time. But why Defense, 
Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education?
  Well, first of all, that is 62 percent of all the spending. If we can 
get this bill passed today, get a conference with the House, get this 
single bill on the President's desk by the end of the fiscal year, we 
will have funded that much of the government in a timely way for the 
first time in a decade.
  If we can add the other bills to it that the House and Senate have 
passed, we will have 90 percent of the spending on the President's desk 
and in place before the spending year starts.
  It doesn't sound as if that would be a very big accomplishment, but 
by the standards of the last decade, it would be an incredible 
accomplishment to bring these bills to the floor, to allow them to be 
debated, to allow them to be amended. We have a managers' package that 
would include a number of the 60 or so proposed amendments just on the 
Labor, Health and Human Services, Education part of the bill. I don't 
know how that is exactly going to work out today, but I do know we can 
take that managers' package to the conference and say: This is what we 
agreed to as a managers' package. Whether we officially are able to add 
it or not, every bit of it is germane to the bill, germane, in my view, 
to what could happen in conference.
  I would also point out that, for decades, the priority of my side of 
the aisle, of our side of the aisle, has been that defending the 
country first is the No. 1 priority.
  One of the top priorities on the other side of the aisle has been: 
Well, let's take the biggest of the nondefense bills and be sure we are 
equally prioritizing it.
  So in my view, for perhaps the first time this has ever happened, the 
leaders have decided to bring these two top priorities to the floor 
together and let voters, Democrats and Republicans, voters on the 
Senate floor, decide how they want to move forward with those bills.
  Let me just talk for a few minutes about one of the items in our 
bill--the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee, 
which you and I serve on--and that would be healthcare research, 
specifically Alzheimer's and how it relates to that research.
  First of all, for a dozen years, ending 4 years ago, there had not 
been a penny of increase in health research.
  When I became chairman of this committee 4 years ago, Senator Murray 
and I began to work on reprioritizing healthcare research, with 
Democrats and Republicans getting together to figure out what we needed 
to do. For at least the first couple of years, what we needed to do was 
eliminate other programs and combine other programs and make tough 
choices to be sure that health research was a priority.
  When we pass this bill today, we will have increased health research 
spending in a budget that for 2 years had no growth at all and has had 
some growth in the last 2, but by 30 percent--30 percent--from $30 
billion a year to $39 billion a year at a time when we know more about 
the human genome, we know more about what makes each of us different 
from all the rest of us than we have before.
  What are we beginning to see? We are seeing things in immunotherapy 
in cancer; we are seeing things in brain research. We are not seeing 
the kinds of results we want to see yet in Alzheimer's, but we are 
moving in that direction.
  Every hour, Alzheimer's disease costs taxpayers at least $21 
million--every single hour. Someone in the United States is developing 
Alzheimer's every 65 seconds. We are spending somewhere in the 
neighborhood of 277 billion tax dollars a year on Alzheimer's and 
dementia-related care.
  I have just given three numbers. It is hard to talk about 
appropriating without giving numbers. Maybe numbers are not the most 
riveting thing, particularly when you start talking about millions or 
billions or even trillions. What does that really mean?
  That means we are spending basically an amount equal to half of the 
defense budget on Alzheimer's and dementia-related care. That will have 
an overwhelming impact if we don't do something differently than we are 
doing right now, just because of the projected long life and 
demographics of the country. In 2050, which is 32 years from now, we 
will be spending, in today's dollars, $1.1 trillion on Alzheimer's and 
dementia care--$1.1 trillion. One point one anything--who knows? Let's 
go back to defense again. That is twice the defense budget of last 
year--twice the defense budget.
  I don't really have a great grasp of what $1.1 trillion is, but I do 
have a sense of what every military base everywhere in the world would 
be. Add to that every ship, every plane, every piece of equipment, and 
add to that every training dollar, and add to that every paycheck for 
every soldier, sailor, airman, marine, person in the National Guard, 
the Coast Guard, the Reserves, and you will begin to approach a pretty 
big number.
  We would be spending more than twice that amount. If you add up all I 
have just talked about, taxpayer spending would be more than twice that 
just on Alzheimer's and dementia.
  Obviously, there is a huge taxpayer need to find a solution here. 
There is an even bigger individual need. It is not only a devastating 
disease for people who have it, it is a devastating disease for the 
people who care about them. There is one generally used number out 
there that says for every tax dollar we are spending on Alzheimer's and 
dementia right now, we are spending two private dollars, almost never 
insured. These are caregivers. These are people who care about you, who 
give up part or all of their career and time to take care of you 
instead of doing what they otherwise would be doing. The person being 
taken care of may not have any real idea, at some point, as to what is 
going on, but the people taking care of them know. That is a big reason 
to find a solution.
  If we could just delay the onset of Alzheimer's, if we could figure 
out how to come up with something that would slow down the onset of 
that disease, if we could delay the onset by an average of 5 years, we 
would cut that $1.1 trillion by 42 percent--almost in half. If we could 
just have the average person who gets Alzheimer's get it 5 years later 
than they are getting Alzheimer's today, almost half, 42 percent, of 
that $1.1 trillion would go away. So this is something we obviously 
need to prioritize.

[[Page S5875]]

  Just 4 years ago, we were spending about $600 million on Alzheimer's 
research. We were spending $250 billion on taxpayer-related care. We 
were spending $600 million--what is that? Is that one-quarter of 1 
percent? We were spending $600 million on research to try to help solve 
this problem that we are spending these billions of dollars on every 
year.
  In 4 years, we have gotten that number beyond the disease goal a 
handful of years ago. We said: If we just could have $2 billion for 
Alzheimer's research every year, we would have a better chance to find 
a solution.
  Well, this year, we have passed the $2 billion. We are at $2.34 
billion, but we are still spending less than 1 percent on trying to 
find a solution to the problem of what we are spending every year on 
the problem. It is an important 1 percent.
  At Washington University in St. Louis--I didn't know when I started 
chairing this committee what great leaders they are in this research 
effort. I knew this was one of the top health research universities in 
the country. I didn't know where we were in terms of the cutting-edge 
on Alzheimer's, but Dr. Randy Bateman at Washington University in St. 
Louis is very close. He has unveiled the results of a blood test that 
hopefully will detect early on whether you individually are on the way 
to developing this problem.
  Obviously that matters if we can find things that could be done to 
significantly slow down the advance of this disease. It is not 
particularly expensive to take a blood test. It is not very invasive. 
It gets a quick result. Now what you have to do--you have to have a CAT 
scan. Somebody, in an expensive process, looks at your brain and 
figures out if you have amyloids developing in your brain that are 
likely to cause this.
  So early detection--Dr. Hodes at the National Institute on Aging at 
NIH says that one of the real reasons we can't find solutions is we 
cannot figure out how to get the right group to clinically test. A 
blood test would help with that. So we are working on that.
  I see my friend Senator Markey is here. I would point out to him that 
because of the leader's time, I started talking only about 8 minutes 
ago and maybe have only 2 minutes right now.
  If you want to use that 2 minutes before the vote--but we do have a 
vote--then we will figure out later, maybe, how to get back to your 
time. But thanks for your interest in health research. Certainly, Dr. 
Blumenthal, the Senator's wife, is a great advocate of this. Why don't 
I yield this last minute or so to Senator Markey; then maybe there will 
be other time later, but I know we have a vote scheduled in a minute.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Mr. MARKEY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be 
allowed to speak for 4 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
  Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. MARKEY. Thank you, Madam President.
  I thank the Senator from Missouri for his great leadership on this 
issue. As he was pointing out, this issue of whether we make a 
continued increase in the funding for research at NIH goes right to the 
long-term budgetary objectives of our country.
  If we do not find the cure for Alzheimer's by the time we reach the 
year 2050, the budget at Medicare and Medicaid for taking care of 
Alzheimer's patients will be equal to the defense budget of our 
country. Obviously, that is not sustainable. So the only way we are 
going to be able to deal with this issue is to find a cure.
  Research is medicine's field of dreams, from which we harvest 
findings that give hope to families that there could be a cure for the 
disease that runs through their family's history. It could be 
Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes, cancer. Whatever the disease, it is 
going to take funding from the NIH to match the magnitude of the 
challenge. That is what this bill is going to do.
  Working with Chairman Shelby and Senator Leahy, along with Mr. Blunt, 
what we are seeing is another dramatic increase. He and Senator Murray 
have worked with the chairs in order to accomplish this goal.
  Ultimately, I know how important this issue is because my mother died 
from Alzheimer's. The funding level for Alzheimer's research has been 
woefully inadequate matched against the magnitude of the problem, so 
there has had to be a dramatic increase.
  Unfortunately, from 2002 until 2007, we have just level funding at 
the National Institutes of Health, and that meant a cut by ultimately 
20 percent in the spending capacity of NIH. So now we are making up for 
lost ground. The key is, it draws the most talented young people in 
America toward the goal of finding the cures and the breakthroughs that 
can ultimately give hope to families because NIH isn't just the 
National Institutes of Health, it is the ``National Institutes of 
Hope''--the hope people have that the disease that runs through their 
family will, in fact, be cured.
  That is why this budget is so important because it is going to 
increase the hope families have. It is going to draw more scientists 
toward these issues. It is going to lead to more breakthroughs because 
whether it be Alzheimer's or cancer or diabetes or ALS or whatever the 
disease is, failure is not an option. We must find the breakthroughs 
that are going to make a difference.
  When it comes to Alzheimer's itself, when I was a boy, President 
Kennedy said the mission to the Moon was what we should all be focusing 
on. Well, in the 21st century, it is the mission to the mind. It is to 
try to find ways in these labyrinthian passageways of the human brain 
that we can find the clues that make it possible for us to find the 
cure.
  I thank the Senator from Missouri. I thank you, Madam President, for 
giving me an opportunity to extend. There is no more important issue 
than what we are going to be dealing with.
  With that, I yield back.
  Mr. BLUNT. I yield back my time as well.

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