Nih Cuts Affecting Cancer Patients
Floor Speech
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Mr. CASTEN. Mr. Speaker, a few weeks ago, I got a call from a constituent whose 46-year-old son had just been diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer back in December, and the whole family is now wondering whether he is going to live long enough to see his kids graduate from high school.
It is sad. We sort of shared the pain of fathers who lost kids, worried about losing kids. There is no need to tell anybody here that cancer sucks.
That wasn't why he called. He called because his son's doctors told him that as you go through the course of this treatment, typically, chemo stops working after about 6 months. You see some tumor reduction, and then it stops working. At that point, you really need to start looking for alternatives.
Typically, those alternatives mean you start getting into experimental trials. Those are no longer available because Trump and Elon Musk's cuts to NIH are forcing the local hospitals, the local universities, and the drug companies that would have done these clinical trials, to shut them down.
As he put it to me: As a father, I have to balance hope with reality, but it seems like all I have right now is reality.
Then he said to me: Do the Republicans you work with know that they can get cancer, too? Are any of them going to stand up? Don't they get these calls from their constituents? Why don't they care?
I see them all looking away. How would you have me answer that question?
I tried. I did my best to explain the psychology of folks I work with who fear Trump more than they fear cancer. Mostly I just got sad because this is a guy who said I want hope; all I have is reality. What I want for hope is medicine, and all I could give him was political science to give him some reality.
These stories are in all of our districts. All of our constituents want hope. It is the least we can give them, and we are failing.
Mr. Speaker, I ask my Republican colleagues to just please grow a spine. Stand up. Give us some reason to hope. Give me a better answer to the next constituent who calls my office, or indeed yours, with those same questions.
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