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November 25, 2005
At the mercy of a dysfunctional Congress
He happened to have dinner with doctor friends of his wife, a doctor herself. He was excited to hear them talk about the viable prospect of cancer cures. He assembled his speechwriters and told them to plug in a section whereby he'd call for a Kennedy-to-the-moon goal to cure cancer in a decade. Let's simply take a look at it, he said. He would remove it, of course. It was entirely too ambitious and costly. Having only recently been caught lying to the people about his own chronic illness, he was in no position to take chances. His speech would remain timid and trite. He simply wanted to fantasize about eloquence and the can-do spirit and nobler, grander ideals - things all presidents surely intend in the beginning, before their Vietnams and Watergates and sex scandals and misbegotten invasions. That's all fiction, of course. It's from a television show, "West Wing." But it's timely and poignant. I was reminded of it as I learned more about this idea to create a cabinet-level agency called the American Center for Cures. I had been timelier than I knew in a column last week about new ideas from the Democrats, one of which has percolated from the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. It is to create this national cure center, apart from the National Institutes of Health, to coordinate, concentrate, intensify and better finance our scientific and medical efforts to find cures for our most tragic and costliest killer plagues, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and cancer. It is a mostly Democratic initiative, which, sadly, could be its downfall in a Washington culture currently more poisoned than ever by partisanship. One of its chief designers, Dr. Richard Boxer, a clinical professor at the University of Wisconsin, has worthy bipartisan credentials in public health policy, but was, after all, a health care adviser to Al Gore's presidential campaign. A letter touting this cure center to President Bush has been signed by 13 governors, all, it seems, are Democrats. It cannot go without mention that a full-bore effort to heighten scientific and medical research to find cures for our worst diseases could run quickly afoul of Bush's aversion to stem-cell research. That may explain why the Democratic governors haven't received any favorable commitments from their letter to Bush. Nor should it go without mention this will be an expensive proposition, requiring new funding at a time when we spend record amounts of borrowed money on Iraq and Katrina. But there are fiscal arguments for it, beyond the basic human ones. The Democratic governors' letter to Bush contends that delaying the onset of Alzheimer's by five years would solve their states' Medicaid crises in long-term care. It is quite true that Medicaid, the federal-state partnership providing health care for the low-income and otherwise needy, is going broke for several reasons, the foremost of which is the staggering expense of acute end-of-life care. Dr. Boxer tells me that if things go according to plan, this bill to create the American Center for Cures will be introduced Dec. 7 under the promising bipartisan sponsorship of Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., a leader of the DLC, and Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., who only so happens to be the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. If there were any matter on which Congress ought to be able to put aside partisan bitterness, you'd think this might be it. But as we endeavor to temper our cynicism, we'd best temper our confidence and optimism as well. It's probably not out of the question that "West Wing" had it right - that our political systems have been rendered so dysfunctional for the time being that they won't be able to work effectively even in the interest of saving our two most precious resources, lives and money. Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com. |
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