Letter to Congressional Colleagues - Cures for Patients and Responsible Budgeting

Letter

Dear Colleague,

Today there are 10,000 known diseases or conditions, but we only have cures and treatments for 500 of them. In coming days, the House is poised to pass a landmark, bipartisan bill that will take a major step forward in bringing more cures to patients. The 21st Century Cures legislation would accelerate the discovery, development and delivery of life-saving and life-improving therapies.

Among its many merits, this bill will help our scientific research institutions better capitalize on ground-breaking scientific advancement that has occurred over the past two decades. Under the Cures bill, the NIH will receive an additional $1.75 billion per year for the next five years ($8.75 billion total) and the FDA will receive an additional $550 million. Both the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Appropriations Committee support the structure of the funding. This bill also reauthorizes the NIH--the first time that's been done since 2007.

Overall, these resources will support important new research and the safe and speedy approval of new treatments and therapies. This funding ensures real dollars will flow to vital health research and innovation initiatives, and that this spending is fully offset in the budget window.

This is not only good news for patients, it is healthy budgeting too. Every dollar of advanced appropriations in the bill is offset with other reforms--including billions of dollars in mandatory entitlement savings in Medicare and Medicaid. Beyond the budget window, in the second decade, these permanent reductions in Medicare and Medicaid spending will yield at least $7 billion in additional savings for taxpayers. For comparison, the widely-heralded Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 (commonly referred to as "Ryan-Murray") included less than $2 billion in Medicaid savings.

We think trading smart, targeted permanent entitlement cuts for temporary spending priorities is not only fiscally responsible, it's strategic. Unlike permanent mandatory spending and entitlements, this temporary funding is a defined amount for a limited period of time. While more will need to be done outside of this legislation to shore up our aging health care entitlements, as the Conservative Reform Network noted, "the budgetary process itself is worthy of support" from conservatives.

There are other important cost-savings in the bill that the Congressional Budget Office cannot quantify. Over the long term, many experts suggest that money spent in the short-term to develop new treatments and cures can yield dramatic savings to the federal budget as well. This 21st Century Cures legislation could potentially help achieve savings for taxpayers that would grow exponentially over time.

For example, as the President's Council on Science and Technology has noted, Alzheimer's disease, which already afflicts more than 5 million people in the United States, accounts for nearly $140 billion in Medicare and Medicaid payments. One study noted that over the next 40 years, caring for patients with Alzheimer's could cost the federal government as much as $15 trillion dollars. We believe accelerating the cycle of ground-breaking cures is not only critical to addressing the human costs that diseases like Alzheimer's inflict on our families and friends, but also to addressing our Nation's healthcare spending--transformational cures can help reduce some of the cost-drivers for Medicare and Medicaid's continued upward spending trajectory.

We have already seen a story like this unfold, when a past generation of Americans was faced with a polio epidemic. When the menace of polio peaked in the early 1950s, the national strategy to combat the disease involved a massively-expensive, labor-intensive effort that envisioned building hundreds of hospitals and warehousing patients in them who were to be treated with iron lungs. The cost of this strategy was enormous, since "in the 1930s, an iron lung cost about $1,500--the average price of a home." But then, researchers developed the polio vaccine, which Michael Milken estimates "has saved the United States an estimated $800 billion since 1955."

We believe we stand on the threshold of a "polio moment." The human genome has been sequenced. The era of personalized medicine has arrived. Soon it will be time for the House to pass the 21st Century Cures legislation--a fiscally responsible approach to improving the discovery, development and delivery of cures for patients around the country.

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