Ed Markey: “But I come to the floor in order to identify the single most glaring deficiency in the legislation. This is a promise of…”

“But I come to the floor in order to identify the single most glaring deficiency in the legislation. This is a promise of a 5 percent increase in the NIH budget each year. But the reality is that this 5 percent is an imaginary 5 percent because this 5 percent does not account for the reality of health care inflation. On an average year, health care inflation is 3 to 4 percent. In some years it is 5 to 10 percent, meaning that a 5 percent increase is actually in some years an actual reduction in the amount of money which can be used for health care research. In fact, what we have seen over the last 3 years is that while the Republicans have flatlined the NIH budget, it has actually lost 11 percent of its purchasing power in new research that targets the diseases which affect American families. Research is medicine's field of dreams from which we harvest the findings that give hope to American families, the clues that can unlock the diseases which they fear will affect their family, and there is no family that doesn't have some disease that they believe runs through their family's history.”