[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 10]
[House]
[Page 14961]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1215
                NO NEW PATIENTS, NO NEW CLINICAL TRIALS

  (Mr. HIGGINS asked and was given permission to address the House for 
1 minute.)
  Mr. HIGGINS. Mr. Speaker, instead of waging a war on cancer, the 
Republican Tea Party is waging a war on cancer patients.
  The Tea Party shutdown will deny 200 patients a week--30 of them 
kids--treatment at the largest research hospital in the world, the 
National Institutes of Health. These are often last-chance cancer 
treatments that offer the only hope for kids who are stuck with cancer.
  And why did the Tea Party shut down the government? Because they 
oppose the Affordable Care Act. This is a law that says that never 
again can insurance companies deny coverage for a family with a kid who 
is stuck with cancer. Under the Affordable Care Act, no family will go 
bankrupt because of cancer. And this is the bill the Tea Party is so 
furious about.
  What's more, the Tea Party budgets have decimated cancer research. 
NIH used to fund 33 percent of applications for promising research; 
today, it's 16 percent. The shutdown is stopping cancer research at 
Roswell Park and across the country.
  I hear we may take another fake vote tonight to restore funding to 
the National Institutes of Health. This is disgusting. This bill will 
continue the sequester assault on cancer research.
  I would remind my colleagues that for families and kids fighting 
cancer, the only failure in cancer research is when you are forced to 
quit because of a Tea Party Federal Government shutdown.

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