Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, we are going to talk about our health, not about last week's legislation and the effort to change the Affordable Care Act but rather about another part of the health of the American public. The most remarkable proposal came from the President recently in his budget proposals. {time} 1815 I know that when I saw what he was proposing, I am thinking: You have got to be kidding. He is proposing a $5.6 billion reduction in the National Institutes of Health's research programs. I want to just take a second here and draw your attention to what research really means. The National Institutes of Health is the principal research arm for healthcare issues throughout the United States. Over the years, we have spent very large amounts of taxpayer dollars dealing with health issues in the United States. The result of those research efforts, together with the implementation, has resulted in breast cancer deaths dropping, between 2000 and 2013, by 2 percent, prostate cancer deaths down 11 percent, heart disease down 14 percent, stroke down 23 percent, HIV/ AIDS down 52 percent. Research pays in better lives, in people living longer and the quality of their life. And yet this 18 percent reduction that has been proposed by the President in the basic funding for medical research here in the United States goes directly against these very important and very impressive changes in the statistics about mortality--HIV/ AIDS, 52 percent.…”