John Garamendi: “Exactly. We have been talking about students, some of whom are young, some not so young, and others who are carrying…”

“Exactly. We have been talking about students, some of whom are young, some not so young, and others who are carrying those student loans. But if you begin to look at the totality of society, and if we care about each other and about what is happening in our communities, we come to the more senior years, and immediately we find that seniors are faced with a host of issues. One of the issues--and I am glad you brought this up--is Alzheimer's and dementia. Let me show you something that we developed here. This is a graph of the cost of Alzheimer's in our society. It is growing very, very rapidly. You can see right now we are spending somewhere around $236 billion a year on it. And as the population ages, which is part of the baby boom, and the fact that we are all going to get older, we figure by 2050 that we will be spending $1.3 trillion a year to deal with Alzheimer's. It is an extraordinary burden and it is probably one that will bust the bank, the Medicare bank, and the Medicaid bank. We know that these costs are shared largely by the Federal Government and by individuals and families. In my own family, my mother-in-law was a victim of Alzheimer's, and she spent her last 3 years of her life in our home and we were able to care for her, but that is unusual. For most families, it is a burden that cannot be afforded, so that cost then comes to the Medicare and the Medicaid program. In fact, the single biggest expense in Medicaid is dementia and Alzheimer's.…”