Joe Biden has made a lot of ridiculous claims over the last few years but his most ridiculous and repeated claim has been about Alzheimer’s patients and that US hospital beds will be overwhelmed by Americans suffering from Alzheimer’s in two decades. The claim is so absurd that it has even been branded as “nonsensical” by the Washington Post.
“You know, if we don’t do something about Alzheimer’s in America, every single, solitary hospital bed that exists in America … every single one will be occupied in the next 15 years with an Alzheimer’s patient,” Biden said at a ceremony on May 27.
President Biden previously claimed during a tour of a cancer hospital that it would take 20 years for it to happen and that he believes combating Alzheimer’s to be an important priority. But fact-checkers for many social media platforms and The Washington Post revealed that there is no basis for these claims or research and that no evidence points to this happening anytime soon in U.S hospitals.
Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave President Biden “four Pinocchios” for this nonsensical claim and asked if there was any evidence to if this claim was correct. He said he had no idea how the president came up with this 2040 prediction within U.S hospitals.
“Normally when a politician makes a detailed claim like this, we can quickly find a possible source—a report in an academic journal or from a think tank, a congressional hearing, or an expert’s speech—from which the factoid was plucked (and possibly twisted). But we could not find anything. We consulted with many experts on Alzheimer’s disease, but they were stumped, too. This seems to be a Biden original,” Kessler said.
The Alzheimer’s Association currently calculates more than 6 million people living today with Alzheimer’s, which they said will grow to 11.2 million by 2040. But fact-checkers have pointed out how Alzheimer’s patients spend time in hospital beds, but often end up in nursing homes and hospices.
Kessler reiterates that 2040 calculations show that there will be plenty of hospital beds with the anticipated increase in patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
“Biden wants to show that he considers combating Alzheimer’s and other diseases to be an important priority. That’s a laudable aspiration. But he shouldn’t gild the lily with figures that seem plucked from thin air—which might also explain why they change depending on the day,” he wrote, giving Biden’s fifth “Four Pinocchios” rating since taking office.
This has clearly been one “heavily researched” topic by Biden while his own mental health continues to decline. He’s probably basing the claims on his own conditions and worried about it…talk about hinting at what he’s been told.
