FY 96' FUNDING FOR
THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH

In the current budget crisis, funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is threatened with drastic cuts that will seriously undermine research funding, not only the intramural research carried on within the institutes themselves, but also the extramural research carried on across the country.

Congress needs to hear from all of you the message that cuts in research funding can have far-reaching effects, at a time when we seem to be on the verge of important discoveries that can change cancer therapy from indiscriminate cell killing to targeted, tumor specific therapies.

A sample letter follows. Read it, send it or one of your own composition to the President (president@whitehouse.gov), your senators and congressmen. They need to hear the message, and hear it from a lot of people, that this is important to the future of Americans.
President Clinton:

For the past 40 to 50 years, you, your family, and every American has directly benefited from research and training supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). We take for granted that the physicians who care for us have been educated in medical schools by physician-scientists who were either educated at the NIH or through research programs supported by NIH. Medical and pharmaceutical researchers throughout our county had part or all of their research training through the extramural grant programs of the NIH. Thus, our health and that of our families and fellow Americans has benefited by one of the most popular (a recent study found 73% of respondents want NIH funding to increase) and universally beneficial of all federal programs.

The NIH supports research throughout the country that benefits all Americans. Examples are:

• the potential elimination of dreadful hereditary diseases such as Huntington's disease and Tay-Sachs disease through genetic testing;
  
• the creation of generations of antibiotics that have drastically reduced death from infection;
  
• better treatment for mental illness and pain;
  
• genetic tests that reduce the risk of dying from breast and colon cancer;
  
• vaccines that have eradicated polio, smallpox, and other devastating infectious diseases;
  
• and a host of technologic advances in medicine from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to balloon angioplasty to the non-invasive treatment of kidney stones.

Researchers today are on the brink of tremendous breakthroughs in medical science. New levels have been reached in understanding the function of the human cells, the complexity of brain function, the causes of cancer and the potential for direct non-toxic treatments for cancer, as well as genetic and molecular basis for the myriad's of diseases that afflict humans. This research is more complex than that of the 1950s and 1960s and costs approximately 5-fold more, but the potential for significant impact on disease is as great. More people do research today with more and greater breadth of understanding than in past years. Scientific equipment has been part of the explosion in knowledge by reducing and eliminating in many cases tedious repetitive processes. Support from the NIH has played a significant role in supporting this research, but that support has never kept pace with true inflation in the cost of medical research.

Couple that with the fact that there are forces within our country committed to reducing the cost of health care expenditures through the marketplace without regard to quality of services offered or the impact on biomedical research infrastructure in the country. The economic impact of managed care and HMOs is devastating to our medical schools and research centers of excellence, which reinvest in the future of medical research with revenues derived from patient care activities. This has further reduced the amount of money available for research by an estimated $1 billion dollars.

You as my elected representative must make a commitment to maintain the NIH budget at a level of at least $11.939 billion for FY 96 so that we do not irreparably damage the infrastructure of biomedical research in this country. The most cost-effective way to control costs of medical delivery is to replace expensive temporizing therapies with therapies that eliminate disease, those therapies will only be found through research. The relatively small amount of money needed by the NIH to insure the good health of Americans should not and must not be considered negotiable. Do not risk our health and that of our children with short-sighted budget-cutting.

Signed