A Make America Healthy Again moment for Alzheimer’s

Earlier this year, I sponsored the Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Initiative in the Florida Legislature, which passed both chambers unanimously. The bill rests on a simple idea: Florida has spent decades building one of the strongest Alzheimer’s response systems in the country, but a system only works if the families who need it know it exists.

I came to this fight through my own family. I lost my father to Alzheimer’s. Anyone who has been through it knows this disease takes someone you love long before it finally takes their life, and it leaves you with a clear-eyed sense of how much ground we still have to cover.

Across Florida, that fight is playing out in nearly 580,000 households today — more than the population of Miami. To support those families, our state has spent four decades putting the pieces in place: respite care in all 67 counties, Memory Disorder Clinics, the Florida Brain Bank, and the Ed and Ethel Moore Alzheimer’s Research Program.

In 2023, Florida took a major step forward in Alzheimer’s care. The Legislature approved my proposal to expand Alzheimer’s training and education standards across our healthcare system, ensuring both professional caregivers and family members have better tools to care for loved ones facing this devastating disease. Too often, families are thrust into the role of caregiver with little preparation and nowhere to turn. Empowering caregivers with better education and support means better care, stronger protections, and greater dignity for Florida families facing this disease.

The same principle has to drive the federal response. To finish what we’ve started, we need national leadership.

The Trump administration has put chronic disease prevention at the center of American health policy. The Make America Healthy Again movement has changed how the country thinks about food, sleep, exercise and metabolic health. Science increasingly backs many of those priorities.

Nothing illustrates that better than Alzheimer’s. A growing body of research shows the lifestyle priorities MAHA champions can meaningfully reduce dementia risk before the disease ever takes hold. For people already showing early signs, new blood tests can catch Alzheimer’s before symptoms appear, and new therapies can slow its progression in the earliest stages. None of this is theoretical anymore — it is happening in clinics and labs across the country right now.

That being said, the urgency to act is real. More than 7 million Americans live with Alzheimer’s today, a number projected to nearly double by 2060. It is one of the few leading causes of death in this country without a cure, and it costs the American healthcare system an estimated $781 billion a year.

A serious federal initiative would unleash American innovation, prioritize prevention, guarantee timely diagnosis, and ensure that the treatments the FDA has already approved actually reach the patients who need them. The public is already there: More than 90% of voters support requiring Medicare to cover early-detection blood tests and easing access to approved Alzheimer’s therapies. Those aren’t partisan positions. They are the kind of consensus an administration can build on.

Moments like this do not come around often when the science, the public will and presidential leadership all line up at the same time. President Donald Trump and his team have already built the platform with MAHA, and with this administration leading the way, America can finally win the fight against Alzheimer’s.

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Rep. Dean Black, a Jacksonville Republican, represents House District 15 and is a member of the House Health & Human Services Committee.