Jackie Speier: “Tonight we are going to discuss the National Institutes of Health. In many respects, the National Institutes of Health…”

“Tonight we are going to discuss the National Institutes of Health. In many respects, the National Institutes of Health is the goose that keeps laying the golden eggs, the golden eggs that help cure many of the maladies that many Americans suffer from, the goose that lays the golden eggs that create jobs, the goose that lays the golden eggs that help us bring down the cost of health care. But we are at the brink, we are at the tipping point of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Let's put it in perspective. Not so long ago, then-President George Bush was part of a bipartisan effort to double the funding for the National Institutes of Health. It was $21 billion. Doubling of the resources for the NIH was extraordinary and received with great fanfare and appreciation because there was so much that the researchers were ready to do with that money. What have we done since then? Since then, in 2003 dollars, we have seen a gross decline in the money to fund the National Institutes of Health. Now it is down to the equivalent of $17 billion. So for the next hour, we are going to talk about what that means to every American who is suffering from a cancer, for every American that is suffering with a chronic disease like diabetes, for every American who is suffering from Alzheimer's and whose family is trying to cope with it.…”