Denying the Inevitable

If 243 members of Congress knew that they were going to develop Alzheimer’s Disease or related dementia, would it change the way they make Medicaid and long term care policy?

Or would they continue to deny the inevitable?

When Congress convened in 2011, the average age of a House member was 57, and the average age of a senator was 62.   They were approaching the prime years for dementia.

If you don’t already have Alzheimer’s Disease or related dementia by the time you turn 65, then your chances of developing it between the ages of 65 and 74 are greater than one in 20.  Your chances of developing it between the ages of 75 and 84 are almost one in 7.  And after that your chances of developing it are one in 4.

At today’s prevalence rates, 28 members of Congress will develop dementia between the ages of 65 and 74, 91 between the ages of 75 and 84, and 124 later on.

The only thing that will change this trajectory is if they die sooner of something else.

If I were a younger elected official today, this might get might attention, and it also might get my attention that the number of people with dementia will increase from 5.2 million today to at least 11 million during my lifetime.

Representative Aaron Schock of Illinois and Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Marco Rubio of Florida all fit this bill.  They were the youngest members of their respective chambers (at 39, Senator Lee was a week younger than Senator Rubio), and they had remaining life expectancies of at least 40 years. 

So while we might forgive 87-year old Representative Ralph Hall of Texas and Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey if they feel they don’t always have the luxury of taking the long view in policy-making, we should wonder a little more about Senators Lee and Rubio and Representative Schock.

They are all likely to be around when the fruits of their recent healthcare work ripen over the coming decades. 

And they may find some of them especially bitter.  

According to the Alzheimer’s Association publication 2012 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures, the cost of caring for people with Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementias – in today’s dollars – will increase from $200 billion to $1.1 trillion per year by 2050.

These $1.1 trillion are not inflated by forty years of GDP growth or the increased costs of medicine.  They represent what dementia will cost us down the road even with no inflation simply because there are more of us and we’re living longer lives.

Dementia is an adversary worthy of battle at the highest levels of government.  But neither Senator Lee nor Senator Rubio nor Representative Schock mentions it on his website. 

Instead, Senator Lee champions what he calls “saving the American dream,” which rolls back Medicaid funding to 2007 levels and caps it there.  Senator Rubio has endorsed the same approach.  Medicaid currently pays $36 billion a year of the $200 billion cost of care for people with dementia.  Under Senator Lee’s plan, it will pay even less than that toward the $1.1 trillion cost of care in 2050.

And Representative Schock goes one step further.  He touts a bipartisan effort last year to repeal the CLASS Act, which ironically would have offered private insurance for dementia-related care to take some of the burden off Medicare and Medicaid.

Dementia hits close to home for all of us.  A member of our family has it, and it has been progressing relentlessly for several years.  This is a pretty scary thing to witness.  It’s like watching a blackboard filled with facts and figures being erased, one giant sweep at a time, until all the information fades.

Senator Lee wants to save the American dream, but does he really want to do it by substituting a national nightmare of disease with no relief?  And whose dreams is he really saving?  Not the ones of our family members with dementia, nor the ones of their caregivers who already shoulder so much of the burden, nor even the ones of the 243 members of Congress who may someday join the ranks of those with dementia. 

Senator Lee, Senator Rubio, and Representative Schock are, of course, entitled to pursue the policies they choose.  But I hope they will never say that no one could have foreseen what they chose to ignore.

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