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Advocacy for immortality

advocacy immortality

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#1 Alvin

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Posted 04 August 2014 - 07:36 PM


Please print this as it contains a few pages

Medical Research Advocacy

 

 

This is a proposal that should appeal to both Progressives and Conservatives. If enacted it would cut the cost of government, reduce expenses, save lives and keep people healthy. .It is obvious that it is important. Unfortunately, at this time, it is not an important issue to any progressive or news organizations.

 

I realize that this is not exactly what you are looking for. It requires patients to read the entire 4 page proposal, but it is worth it.. Please let me explain.

 

By teaming up with other medical research advocacy groups, we can unite and have more influence then working alone. We can also interest the public, including some moderates and conservatives, to join in the campaign because they will want the country to save money. Medical research has the potential to do that. It is not presently part of the conversation. In addition, some of the tools used for medical research are universal.

 

They do not have a special aging or death research electron microscope. They do not have special mass spectrometers for studying immortality. Almost all the research tools necessary for immortality research are also used for general medical research. We should work with other medical research advocacy groups to encourage development of these technologies. This is a road to immortality.

 

The United States spends $2,800,000,000,000 for health care. By 2025 we expect to spend about $4,000,000,000,000.

 

The Federal Agency for Health Care Research and Quality claims that the medical utilization of the top 1% of patients is 21% of the medical expenditures. Five percent of the population uses 50% of the health care expenditures. The bottom 50% use only 2.8% of the health care expenditures.

 

That means that the top 1% of people uses $560,000,000,000 or $200,000 per person of health care. The top 5% of the population cost $1,350,000,000 or $88,000 per person in health care. Fifty percent spend only 2.8% of health care costs. That is under $500.00 per person for care which will come to about $75,000,000,000 for this group.

 

If all people could be put into the top 50% of the health care system current medical expenses, excluding expenditures such as Social Security Disability, food stamps, special transportation, etc. would go from $2,800,000,000,000 to $150,000,000,000. That would be a saving of about $2,650,000,000,000. Obviously, that isn't practical in the near future. We can aim to reduce health care cost by bringing as many people as

possible into the 50% category or as close to it as possible. This should publicized.

 

By 2025 we will spend about $11,000,000,000 a day for health care. The figures given above don't include expenses such as  Social Security Disability, welfare, special transportation for the disabled, food stamps, self paid home care, nursing home assistance, etc. That amounts to  additional hundreds of billions of dollars yearly.

 

The primary reason for the large health care expense is that physicians can't cure chronic diseases unless they cut them out, burn them or poison them.

 

 If a patient goes to a physician who is just starting his practice and has Diabetes, HIV, Asthma and Epilepsy and the doctor is afflicted with Rheumatoid Arthritis and Hypertension when the doctor is ready to retire, if the same patient is sitting in front of him, the patient will still have Diabetes, HIV, Asthma and Epilepsy. The physician will still have Rheumatoid Arthritis and Hypertension. Physicians cannot cure chronic diseases. The health care system only treats many diseases. We need cures. That is why we have large numbers of deaths and medical expenses. (Obviously attacking the aging process is extremely important).

 

What we need is more federal support for medical research. Only 17% of scientific research applications to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are funded. At one time we funded 30% of the applicants. At that time people said that we were starving the research community of funding. The NIH gave approval to 80% of the applicants but only 30% were funded. The research capabilities are much greater today than they were at that time. We can accomplish a lot now that we couldn’t just a few years ago.

 

The government spends $39 billion dollars yearly for medical research and appropriates $69 billion dollars for military research and $17 billion dollars for space research. That is a total of $86 billion dollars for both space and military research. We should spend at least as much money for medical research as we spend for military and space research. Because of advances that were made over the last few years we have the potential to cure chronic diseases with adequate research support. There is a strong probability that the techniques used to cure chronic diseases can also be used to control the aging process..

 

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wants to double the NIH budget.

 

Every two days about 9,300 US citizens die of the top nine diseases. That is about 3,000 more Americans than died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan combined over the last 11 years. The soldiers who died are entitled to the highest honors. Over the next twenty years about 33,800,000 Americans are presently scheduled to die of the top nine diseases. More will be sick and die from other illnesses.

 

We should do discover why old people are very susceptible to illnesses and develop methods of making them more resistant. This will help save a lot of medical and social care money and keep the elderly healthy.

 

Two trillion eight hundred billion dollars is presently spent yearly for health care in the

 United States. That amounts to about $8,700 for every man woman and child. For a family of four it costs $34,800. According to the non partisan Congressional Budget Office it will go up to 25% of the Gross Domestic Product by 2025. That is only 12 years from now. That will bring the cost of medical care to over $50,000 for a family of four. (The economy is expected to grow 3% annually so the figures given above will be much higher). That is more money than tens of millions of families have after paying their taxes. It  will bring the cost of health care to much more than $4 trillion dollars yearly. In addition disabled people often can't work and need welfare, Social Security Disability, home care, institutional care, food stamps and special transportation. This adds hundreds of billions of dollars to America’s expenses. The relative cost of greatly expanded medical research is only a pittance compared to the potential savings for health care and the increase in productivity of our workers. It is advisable to quantify the expenses of sickness.Of course the most important reason for doing the additional research is to save lives improve the health of our people.

 

There will be economic advantages to our Bio Medical research program which will go beyond medical assistance. Because of the Apollo program which allowed us to go to the moon during the 1960's we developed the integrated circuit, fuel cells, computer controlled machining, the Cat Scan, the MRI, Dialysis, etc. There were economic spin offs from the project. We can expect a lot of economic growth potential from the enabling technological development that will be part of our medical research imitative. It will help make us be more prosperous and better be able to compete in international trade. There are undoubtedly things that will be useful to the space program, military and find other uses. Our country will become stronger.

 

Research America, the largest medical research organization in America, conducted dozens of medical research opinion surveys and found that in every survey the majority of people wanted the government to spend more for medical research.

 

A check off could possibly be put on the tax form to ask for medical research donations. It will be voluntary so it won’t be considered a tax.

 

 Conservatives and others want to cut the cost of government and keep the government out of the lives of our people. Medical research can be a vehicle to help accomplish this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                               

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



#2 Alvin

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Posted 25 November 2015 - 07:11 PM

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor Newt Gingrich: Double the N.I.H. Budget

By NEWT GINGRICHAPRIL 22, 2015

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MCLEAN, Va. — NO one who lived through the 1990s would have suspected that one day people would look back on the period as a golden age of bipartisan cooperation. But in some important ways, it was. Amid the policy fights that followed the Republican victories of 1994, President Bill Clinton and the new majorities in Congress reached one particularly good deal: doubling the budget for the National Institutes of Health.

The decision was bipartisan, because health is both a moral and financial issue. Government spends more on health care than any other area. Taxpayers spend more than $1 trillion a year for Medicare and Medicaid alone, and even more when you add in programs like Veterans Affairs, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Indian Health Service.

Unfortunately, since the end of the five-year effort that roughly doubled the N.I.H. budget by 2003, funding for the institutes has been flat. The N.I.H. budget (about $30 billion last year) has effectively been reduced by more than 20 percent since then. As 92 percent of the N.I.H. budget goes directly to research, one result is that the institutes awarded 12.5 percent fewer grants last year than in 2003. Grant applications, over the same period, increased by almost 50 percent.

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Even as we’ve let financing for basic scientific and medical research stagnate, government spending on health care has grown significantly. That should trouble every fiscal conservative. As a conservative myself, I’m often skeptical of government “investments.” But when it comes to breakthroughs that could cure — not just treat — the most expensive diseases, government is unique. It alone can bring the necessary resources to bear. (The federal government funds roughly a third of all medical research in the United States.) And it is ultimately on the hook for the costs of illness. It’s irresponsible and shortsighted, not prudent, to let financing for basic research dwindle.

For example, the total cost of care for Alzheimer’s and other dementia is expected to exceed $20 trillion over the next four decades — including a 420 percent increase in costs to Medicare and a 330 percent increase in costs to Medicaid. Even without a cure, the premium on breakthrough research is high: Delaying the average onset of the disease by just five years would reduce the number of Americans with Alzheimer’s in 2050 by 42 percent, and cut costs by a third. And that’s not even counting the human toll on both patients and caregivers (often family members), whose own health may deteriorate because of stress and depression.

Yet the N.I.H. is spending just $1.3 billion a year on Alzheimer’s and dementia research — or roughly 0.8 percent of the $154 billion these conditions will cost Medicare and Medicaid this year, more than all federal education spending.

Alzheimer’s isn’t unique: Diabetes, kidney disease, heart disease, cancer, stroke and arthritis all cost enormous sums and cause incredible suffering. But the promise of breakthrough cures and treatments for this disease is amazing. The N.I.H. is funding a clinical study that represents a potential paradigm shift in treatment. Rather than try to eliminate the buildup of plaques in the brain after the onset of dementia, researchers are studying interventions in families with a genetic predisposition to early onset Alzheimer’s to prevent the disease before symptoms even develop.

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The N.I.H. is also pioneering the development of immunotherapies, which are already allowing doctors to spur patients’ immune systems to attack cancer and other diseases rather than relying solely on surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. The N.I.H. recently discovered a vaccine that appears to cure an AIDS-like virus in monkeys. The insights from genetics, personalized medicine and regenerative therapies could potentially lead to substantially longer and healthier lives for many. But to achieve that promise will require a greater budget.

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Recent Comments Steve Lisansky

April 22, 2015

He should run for congress. How utterly and amazingly sensible. Obviously not a Republican and clearly unelectable with rational statements...

vandalfan

April 22, 2015

Mr. Gingrich committed ethical violations until he was hounded from office, slashed capital gains taxes which devastated the taxpayers...

mather

April 22, 2015

Newt Gingrich in favor of increasing the budget of a government agency?! Wow!Even a blind pig can find a acorn every now and then. But I...

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Representatives Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan and the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, have put forward an initiative, 21st Century Cures, to explore ways to promote the discovery of medical breakthroughs as well as access to new technologies. Ms. DeGette and another committee member, Michael C. Burgess, Republican of Texas and a physician, have called for requiring the Congressional Budget Office to factor in the savings from preventive health measures when “scoring” the financial impact of proposed legislation, at the request of Congress. In the Senate, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Jerry Moran of Kansas, all Republicans, have championed increasing funding for basic research.

House and Senate negotiators are at work on a budget resolution for the fiscal year that starts on Oct. 1, and the N.I.H. should be a priority. Doubling the institutes’ budget once again would be a change on the right scale, although that increase should be accompanied by reforms to make the N.I.H. less bureaucratic, to give the director more flexibility to focus resources on the most common and expensive health problems, and to place a stronger emphasis on truly breakthrough research.

We are in a time of unimaginable scientific and technological progress. By funding basic medical research, Congress can transform our fiscal health, and our personal health, too.

Newt Gingrich, a Republican, was speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 22, 2015, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Double the N.I.H. Budget. Today's Paper







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