Ed Markey: “Right now, 2010, we spent $172 billion on Alzheimer's patients--$172 billion, Medicare and Medicaid. You're cutting the…”

“Right now, 2010, we spent $172 billion on Alzheimer's patients--$172 billion, Medicare and Medicaid. You're cutting the budget for NIH to find a cure for Alzheimer's. By the time all the baby boomers have retired, the budget for each year is going to be $1 trillion to take care of the 15 million baby boomers that are going to have Alzheimer's in nursing homes. So what are you guys doing? You're saying, We're going to cut the budget for Medicaid, which pays for Alzheimer's patients in nursing homes, and we're going to cut the budget for the cure for the funding for the NIH. You're having it both ways. No cure--and you're then going to cut the money for these poor families under the Medicaid and Medicare budget. You shouldn't do this. The NIH are the National Institutes of Hope--researchers in medicine's field of dreams from which we harvest the findings that give hope to millions of families in our country. You are cutting this budget and you're not giving us an opportunity to make amendments in which we'll be able to put the funding in for the NIH budget. And that is just a very bad moral decision which you are making. And you're sending a false hope to people that you're actually solving the problem by cutting the NIH budget. All of those people who are going to have Alzheimer's--and it's a demographic certainty--are going to cost $1 trillion by 2050. You are doing nothing about that right now.”