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because the majority was skeptical about the low cost of the higher premiums. Research by the sponsors had shown that the additional cost would fall somewhere between $9 and $19 annually for the average company of 250 workers. Perhaps a compromise could have been introduced that would have required employers and employees to split the cost. I’ve been assured a number of times that the issue will be revisited, but so far nothing has come of it.
    Senators Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), longtime advocates for medical research, rebounded quickly, taking a slightly different approach. They introduced S.441, the National Fund for Health Research Act. The bill proposed taking one penny from each dollar paid in insurance premiums, which would result in a nearly $6 billion increase for the National Institutes of Health. This time, I wrote to all one hundred senators:
    I firmly believe that medical research is the key to eliminating disease, reducing human suffering,and lowering health care costs.… I have spoken to executives at several insurance companies about this bill and have been told that their profit margin is so small that the donation of even 1% of their income is an unreasonable hardship. I find this about as credible as the tobacco companies’ claim that nicotine is not addictive. It is hard to sympathize with insurance companies when you watch a mother in tears, begging for a chair so that her quadriplegic son can take a shower.… The insurance companies see this legislation as a tax. My question is: why is it unreasonable, particularly when they would save so much money in the long run? Research will keep the American people healthier, resulting in fewer insurance claims. We tax oil companies and use the money to build and maintain highways. Most states have sales taxes, which are a major source of revenue for a wide variety of programs and services that benefit the public. Why shouldn’t insurance companies be asked to help solve the health care crisis in this country?
    The Harkin-Specter bill was also defeated, effectively ending the fund-raising aspect of insurance reform. Advocates for disease and disability groupsreturned to the campaign to double the budget of the NIH. At the invitation of Morton Kondracke, executive editor of the congressional magazine
Roll Call
, I spoke at a press conference in March 1998:
    What we’ve been doing is the equivalent of launching the space shuttle and then telling the astronauts, “Sorry, we didn’t have enough money to fill the tank.” That is the situation with the NIH today. Only 22 percent of all grant applications are being funded. There is a tremendous amount of good science that is falling by the wayside.
    The next year I offered the following testimony before Congress regarding the president’s budget request for the NIH in fiscal year 2000:
    Though our government operates on a budget that is decided annually, our scientists cannot. New scientific initiatives, experiments, and laboratories across the United States, once nurtured and financed, operate on two- and three- and four-year plans. We must not fund our scientists who have the potential to alleviate enormous suffering without giving them the assurance that wewill not put on the brakes and stop the flow of dollars that will make their progress possible.
     … Without your support, spinal cord victims will continue to sit in wheelchairs, draining the resources of insurance companies as well as Medicaid, Medicare, VA hospitals, and nursing homes. With your continued support, it is very possible that within the next three to five years people who are now afflicted with a wide variety of disabilities will be able to overcome them. They will regain their rightful place in society, rejoin the workforce, and at last be relieved of the suffering they and their families have had to endure. The plea for adequate funding cannot be ignored.
    In the spring of 2000, the need for increased