SPOTLIGHT: THE HEART OF SENIOR LIVING
It’s Personal: Supporting Alzheimer’s Disease Research
by Senator Ed Markey, Massachusetts
United States Congress. It was my way of pushing this disease from out of the shadows. For more than a decade, as my mother
I
slowly deteriorated from her disease, my fa- ther cared for her in the living room of our home. Day-in and day-out, he lifted her from the bed, to the chair, to the bathroom and back again. He used his right arm, developed from years of carting milk up and down stairs as a milkman, to lift her and gently place her down. It was love in its saddest, most beauti- ful and heartbreaking form. We were lucky. My father was a milkman
and had an arm of an ox. Caring for my mother only made him stronger. But not everyone has an arm of a milkman, and though our caregivers are heroes, even he- roes need help. With an aging baby boomer population,
by 2050 the cost of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias alone will cost our nation and its citizens $1.1 trillion each year. That means, in one generation, the Medicare costs of this one disease will be more than our entire federal defense budget is today. Yet, for every $27,000 dollars Medicare
and Medicaid spend on Alzheimer’s disease, the National Institutes of Health invests only $100 in research. That’s why I have devoted so much of my career in Congress fighting for research investments that will help unlock the mysteries of this terrible disease and aid in finding a cure. It’s why I worked to enact the National
Alzheimer’s Project Act and the Alzhei- mer’s Accountability Act, which together require a national plan for preventing and treating Alzheimer’s by the year 2025, along with an honest assessment of the re-
48 SENIOR LIVING EXECUTIVE / ISSUE 2 2017 Ed, his parents, and twin brothers (that’s Ed in the middle!)
sources and investments needed each year to get us there. It’s why I worked to introduce and insti-
tutionalize programs that will help change the way we deliver care for those with Alz- heimer’s by reimbursing doctors for longer discussions about Alzheimer’s and how to plan for the disease. Since Alzheimer’s was first identified, we
have done much to bring Alzheimer’s out of the retirement community and into the national consciousness. We are as close as we have ever been to preventing and curing this disease. But we still have much more work to do. I will continue to fight for my mother, father and all those families across this country who on a daily basis are bat- tling through this devastating disease.
n 1999, after I lost my mother to Alzhei- mer’s disease, I started the bipartisan and bicameral Alzheimer’s task force in the
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