[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 124 (Tuesday, July 30, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5569-S5570]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             ALZHEIMER'S ACCOUNTABILITY AND INVESTMENT ACT

  Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, as if in legislative session and 
notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate 
proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 183, S. 134.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The clerk will report the bill by title.
  The senior assistant executive clerk read as follows:

       A bill (S. 134) to require an annual budget estimate for 
     the initiatives of the National Institutes of Health pursuant 
     to reports and recommendations made under the National 
     Alzheimer's Project Act.

  There being no objection, the Senate proceeded to consider the bill, 
which had been reported from the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, 
and Pensions.
  Ms. COLLINS. I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read 
a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made 
and laid upon the table.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  The bill (S. 134) was ordered to be engrossed for a third reading, 
was read the third time, and passed as follows:

                                 S. 134

       Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of 
     the United States of America in Congress assembled,

     SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

       This Act may be cited as the ``Alzheimer's Accountability 
     and Investment Act''.

     SEC. 2. EXTENSION OF PROJECT.

       Section 2 of the National Alzheimer's Project Act (42 
     U.S.C. 11225) is amended--
       (1) by redesignating subsection (h) as subsection (i); and
       (2) by inserting after subsection (g) the following:
       ``(h) Professional Judgment Budget.--For fiscal year 2024 
     and each subsequent fiscal year, the Director of the National 
     Institutes of Health shall prepare and submit, directly to 
     the President for review and transmittal to Congress, after 
     reasonable opportunity for comment, but without change, by 
     the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Advisory 
     Council, an annual budget estimate for the initiatives of the 
     National Institutes of Health pursuant to the reports and 
     recommendations made under this Act, including an estimate of 
     the number and type of personnel needs for the National 
     Institutes of Health.''.
  Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, I am very pleased to yield at this time 
to the Senator from Massachusetts.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
  Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, thanks to Senator Collins for her longtime 
leadership on this issue.
  There is no more important issue in our country than the scourge of 
Alzheimer's. My mother, like Senator Collins's father, succumbed to 
Alzheimer's. But today, there are very few families in our whole 
country that do not have a similar story, some relative who has had 
Alzheimer's.
  My mother was diagnosed, and she was a brilliant woman. She was 
president of her senior class in high school.

[[Page S5570]]

But her mother died--my grandmother--when my mother was 17. She had to 
be the mother and raise her three younger sisters so she never got to 
go to college. She ultimately finished raising the first family. Then, 
at 37, she married my father who was a milkman and then had me at 39 
and my two brothers at age 40 and then she raised us.
  Now, my mother was a completely brilliant woman. She could do 
calculus for fun at the table, even though she never had calculus in 
school. And my father used to say, after my mother contracted 
Alzheimer's, your mother was a brilliant woman. It was an honor that 
your mother married me. Your mother is never stepping foot in a nursing 
home. No one is touching your mother at 2 a.m. in the morning. It was 
an honor that she married me.
  And so at age 80, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90, my father kept my mother in our 
living room. That is my story. That is my family's story. That is 
Senator Collins's story. That is the story of millions of families in 
our country.
  Alzheimer's is a scourge that needs to be defeated.
  And so I learned a lot from my father and his dedication to my 
mother. He was a milkman for the Hood milk company. He was 6 feet 1 
inch, 265, so he could do it. But many families cannot do it, 
especially when it is the man who has Alzheimer's and not the woman--
although, two-thirds of all Alzheimer's cases are women. Can I say that 
again? Two-thirds of all Alzheimer's cases are women in our country. So 
these families are heroes, but heroes need help.
  So in the House, as Senator Collins is leading in the Senate, we were 
able to pass the first law. And the first law said to the National 
Institutes of Health: Break down all the silos at NIH and all of your 
institutes. You all have information on the brain, and you don't even 
share that information on the brain. The Institute on Aging is not 
sharing with Infectious Diseases what you know about the brain. Break 
down all the silos and put together a plan to find the cure by 2025.
  I was leading in the House; that was my bill. Senator Collins was 
doing it in the Senate; that was her bill. That became the law in 2011.
  But we realized by 2014 that a vision without funding is a 
hallucination. Right now in our country between Medicare and Medicaid, 
our country spends the equivalent of one-third of the defense budget's 
money every single year just on Alzheimer's patients--one-third of the 
defense budget.
  By the year of 2050, at the pace at which Alzheimer's is advancing, 
the Alzheimer's budget in our country will equal the defense budget 
because no one is saying that grandma shouldn't have a nursing home bed 
because she has Alzheimer's. That is not going to happen in our 
country. So finding a cure is absolutely not an option.
  And so in 2014, we passed another law. And that law said that each 
year the NIH has to tell the Senate Appropriations Committee and the 
House Appropriations Committee how much money they needed to find the 
cure for Alzheimer's by the year 2025. Well, back then, it was about 
$500 million a year that was spent to fund research.
  Last year, because of that law--Senator Collins leading in the 
Senate, along with me--we are up to $3.7 billion a year because, 
obviously, prevention is preferable to cure. Let's stop it. Let's try 
to get this right at its beginnings.
  And we made some progress, but we are not going to find the cure by 
2025. So what this legislation says is we are extending it out to 2035, 
and we are going to continue both of these programs to make sure that 
it gets the focus at the NIH so that we will find the cure because 
research is medicine's ``field of dreams'' from which we harvest the 
findings that give hope to families that there will be a cure for the 
disease which has been ravaging their family for generations. 
Alzheimer's is the one disease that we all know almost every family in 
our country has in common.
  So President Kennedy created a mission to the Moon in 1961, and our 
country responded to it. And what these two bills that we are passing 
today have done is they have created a mission to the mind. They have 
created a mission to find what is going wrong with the brains of not 
just people in our country but all around the world because we are 
going to have to find the cure. And it is our responsibility here to 
provide leadership in the U.S. Senate, to keep the plan in place, and 
to find the funding that will have the best, brightest young scientists 
in America make careers out of finding the cure for Alzheimer's.
  The same thing is happening with cancer. The same thing is happening 
with HIV. But we have to focus here on Alzheimer's and keep that 
investment rising and rising because patients deserve it; families 
deserve it; caregivers across our country deserve it.
  We have millions of families right now--as Senator Collins just said, 
7 million families--who have this disease in their families right now, 
and there is no cure. The end result is always inexorable. It is always 
inevitable. It always ends the same way. And so we are the only way in 
which this can be solved.

  So 3.7 billion a year--or 4 billion a year--that is a small price to 
pay against the disease which will ultimately cost the Federal 
Government the equal amount as the Defense budget every single year by 
2050. So we have to act. And we have come a long way on research. But 
we have a long way to go.
  So here is what we hope: We hope to promote healthy aging; to reduce 
risk factors; to require the National Alzheimer's Plan to include 
recommendations on reducing health disparities for Black, Brown, and 
disabled Americans, because that is all part of this storyline--along 
with women, they are in a separate and higher risk category than men 
are--and expanding the National Alzheimer's Advisory Council to ensure 
a true whole-of-government approach to preventing, treating, and curing 
Alzheimer's and supporting family caregivers. That is why we can't 
delay another day.
  So I urge my colleagues to celebrate today. We have just passed two 
historic pieces of legislation. And it sets 2035 as the target date. 
And we can get this done, but we have to finish the job.
  And today's vote is going to clear the path for millions of 
Alzheimer's patients and their families, for them, their loved ones, 
and for the communities all across our country.
  And so I thank Senator Collins for her great, great leadership on 
this. And my family and Senator Collins's family, we stand here 
speaking for the 7 million families. And there will be many more to 
come if we don't find a cure. And we thank the Members of the Senate 
for passing this historic legislation today.
  With that, I yield the floor.

                          ____________________