Political Quotes

“Thank you, Mr. Tonko, for joining us in this Special Order hour. Working with you has always been a pleasure. I think this subject is one that you and I and our colleagues will want to take up as the days go forward. In the spring, the 2015 Alzheimer's Day will occur once again here in Washington, DC. There will be thousands of people coming to Congress, knocking on our doors, grabbing our lapels, and asking us to pay attention to this illness. I want to review some of the costs, and then basically wrap this up. You talked about home care. There are articles that appeared recently in The Sacramento Bee about elderly people taking care of each other, a wife taking care of her husband in their 50th year of marriage with severe Alzheimer's, the love that is so apparent, but also the difficulty of an elderly person taking care of another elderly person. We can address that. That is what the HOPE legislation is all about, bringing Medicare into this. The research thing that we talked about earlier, I am going to put up very, very quickly a couple of charts. This one, what is going to happen to the Federal budget if we do not address Alzheimer's, it is $122 billion today; in 35 years or 40 years, we are going to look at over $800 billion, and that doesn't include the private sector. It is going to be $1.2 trillion spent on this, so we are going to bust the budget. If you are a deficit hawk, you should be paying attention to this. What do we need to address it?…”