21st Century Cures Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. HARRIS. Mr. Chairman, curing disease and suffering is something that even this Congress can agree on on both sides of the aisle. This is obvious from tonight's debate.

Preventative measures are important, but there are still diseases that we don't understand how to prevent, much less treat. And the purpose of the cure and innovation fund is, in fact, to accelerate the discovery.

Before I came here, I did research on diseases. Is there anyone in the country who doesn't believe that we will cure diseases like Alzheimer's or ALS? It is only a matter of time and the investments that we place in it. As the gentlewoman from Colorado stated, we have a lot of the pieces in place in order to create these tremendous new discoveries, and this bill gets us on the path.

There is going to be a lot of talk about cost on the floor, but the cost of these diseases is not just measured in dollars. The cost is measured in families in ways that you can't measure in dollars.

Any family who treated a member with Alzheimer's disease, for instance, understands exactly what I mean by that.

Now, a lot of those costs are huge. Alzheimer's alone, for instance, is hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare and Medicaid expenses over the next 10 years. If we can cure it, we can save those.

Mr. Chairman, it is time to invest in those cures. We simply can't afford not to.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source