Just before Christmas, Hillary Clinton announce a plan to end Alzheimer’s Disease by 2025, seeking to triple research funding from $600 to $2 billion a year.
For those who have seen first hand the devastation this disease causes, it is welcoming news. But from a dollars and cents level, this is also a very big deal. The often decade long disease represents about 20% of Medicare and Medicaid’s current budget and is projected to be 30% of the budget by 2030. So if we don’t get our arms around a cure for Alzheimer’s, our already strained health care system for the elderly and poor will be bankrupt.
I learned about the importance of this public policy issue doing a video blog on the New Hampshire Primary. When attending events in the summer I noticed a woman—Brenda Bouchard asking questions about Alzhemier’s. I contacted her to do a profile of what she was doing. She has a husband and mother suffering from Alzheimer’s and went around to various candidate events and asked 13 candidates what they will do to prevent this disease from devastating thousands of lives and families, and from bankrupting our medical safety net. I chronicled this effort in a short documentary.
That was last summer. And last week Brenda got her answer: