Political Quotes

“Thank you. I want to thank Congresswoman Speier for leading this really important debate. We have been talking lately about how we are not going to be able to compete for the economic development in research and biotechnology and all the things that we do at the NIH. But I also want to show how economically--with one of your charts--it really doesn't work for us here at home as well. Pretty much all you can see are the red lines, which are the costs every year in the United States of common diseases. As my colleague, Congressman Garamendi, pointed out, we have $203 billion a year that Alzheimer's costs our society as a whole. This is cancer, $158 billion. We have hypertension, $131 billion; diabetes, $116 billion; obesity, $109 billion; heart disease, $95.6 billion; stroke, $18.8 billion, Parkinson's disease, $6 billion. So it is really easy to see these red lines. Teeny, tiny, and I think maybe the only one you can see here well is the amount of money that we are spending to address these diseases. NIH research funding and annual cost of care for major diseases in the U.S. is what this chart is about. We spend $5.5 billion on cancer research. On Alzheimer's disease it has not even been a billion dollars. It is half a billion dollars for a disease that costs $200 billion to our economy. And on and on.…”