In a slickly produced campaign video, Democratic Party frontrunner Hillary Clinton responded to a woman’s tragic story of losing her husband to dementia at 54 by advocating spending more on medical research and less on the military.
“One thing I want you to know,” Clinton told the woman, “is that I spoke with the, probably, the four leading researchers who are really untangling the neurodegenerative diseases, the dementias like the one that took your husband. And I could tell their excitement about what they think might be possible if we treat this with the same seriousness that it deserves.”
“You know, if we put the money into Alzheimer’s that we otherwise would put into some additional military asset, just think of the lives it would save,” Clinton said, “and the potential that it would, perhaps, create for dealing with tragedies like yours.”
It’s time we treat diseases like Alzheimer’s with the seriousness they deserve. https://t.co/n96g9P9TR1
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) December 29, 2015
Clinton has previously promised to cure Alzheimer’s by 2025 with a pledge to spend $2 billion annually on research into the disease.
This is not the first time a politician has promised a cure for a terrifying medial issue if they are elected. In the 2004 election, Democratic Party vice-presidential nominee John Edwards stated people like the paralyzed late actor Christopher Reeves would walk again if he and John Kerry won the White House because they would fund stem cell research. Edwards told a crowd, “If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve will get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”
In 2009, President Barack Obama lifted the ban on funding stem cell research Edwards billed as the key to a cure. No cure has been developed from that funding.