Alzheimer's Accountability and Investment Act

Floor Speech

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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. 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.

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