As President Joe Biden stumped in Ohio for his massive $6 trillion budget proposal on Thursday, he made a veiled, if perplexing, threat: If the nation doesn’t enact a sweeping plan like the one outlined in his budget, America’s hospitals will be filled to overflowing with patients suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease.
“If we do not do something about Alzheimer’s in America, every single, solitary hospital bed that exists in America — as the nurses can tell you — every single one will be occupied in the next 15 years with an Alzheimer’s patient,” Biden told a crowd at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland. “Every. One. Costing us in excess of a trillion dollars.”
.@POTUS spotlights the looming human and economic impact of #Alzheimers disease in the absence of innovative treatments and therapies. #15years pic.twitter.com/bGXbs6aZkV
— UsAgainstAlzheimer's (@UsAgainstAlz) May 27, 2021
It’s not the first time he’s made the claim — and his comments this week contradict Biden’s claims the last time he made such a charge.
In the homestretch of the 2020 presidential campaign last October, the mask-adorned Democratic candidate told a crowd of senior citizens in Pembroke Pines, Florida:
If we do not — and no drug company has the capacity to do it—If we do not find an answer to Alzheimer’s within the next 19 years, every single, solitary bed that exists in the United States of America now will be occupied by an Alzheimer’s patient.
Under that math, America lost four years in just seven months. No media outlet highlighted the self-refuting nature of Biden’s comments.
It’s not clear what data may, or may not, underlie these competing claims. President Biden offered no proof for his assertion — and the media asked for none, nor did they report that Biden made his statements “without proof,” as they so often did to his predecessor.
There are 919,559 staffed beds in all of the United States, according to the American Hospital Association. There are currently 6.2 million Alzheimer’s in the United States, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
Even assuming a massive growth in the number of Americans who suffer from the tragedy of Alzheimer’s Disease, Biden’s estimate assumes the United States won’t open any new nursing homes or hospitals over the next 15 years, a highly improbable notion given the nation’s graying population.
Instead of asking for clarification, the media mostly ignored the remark while highlighting instead that Biden’s enormous budget contains new spending to fight the dementia-inducing disease.
USA Today reported that Biden’s budget contains “a pioneer breakthrough that we hope we can detect and treat, prevent diseases like Alzheimer’s and diabetes, and give us a chance to end cancer as we know it, because we’ll focus exclusively on those items.” CNN added that the budget includes “$6.5 billion to launch the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a new program aimed at driving innovation in health research that will focus initially on diseases like cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s.”
That makes up approximately 0.1% of Biden’s $6 trillion proposed budget.
The few times reporters have referenced Biden’s ill-defined comments, they have done so to prove Biden is a forward-thinking health policy wonk.
In February, Maria Shriver wrote that “President Biden understands the scope of this slow-moving pandemic, the opportunity, and the consequences of failing to seize the moment.” After quoting his statement to the crowd in Florida, she noted accurately that “[t]he fact is that Alzheimer’s is already our country’s most expensive disease, and continuing to manage it is more costly than developing a cure.”
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.