Congress Has Already Waited A Year On The ASAP Act. Alzheimer’s Patients Can’t Wait Another.

When Congress returns from August recess, lawmakers will face a legislative agenda crowded with funding deadlines and competing priorities. Amid the chaos, one bipartisan bill deserves to move without delay: the ASAP Act, which would create a coverage pathway for new Alzheimer’s detection tests, helping patients get diagnosed earlier and stay independent longer.

Introduced in 2025, the bill cannot afford to sit idle for another year.

Alzheimer’s is a disease of time. Its progression can be meaningfully slowed if it is caught early, and we now have the tools to do just that. Breakthrough diagnostics, including biomarker tests that can detect signs of Alzheimer’s with a simple blood draw, offer a faster, less invasive way to identify the disease.

Diagnosing Alzheimer’s early matters because it buys time to change the course of the disease. Research increasingly shows that lifestyle interventions can help preserve cognitive function, while new disease-modifying therapies have been shown to slow cognitive decline. In both cases, patients stand to benefit most when they can act early.

These innovations make early detection far more valuable than it once was. But while scientists and private-sector innovators have raced ahead, Medicare policy has failed to keep pace. Medicare has no dedicated pathway for evaluating and covering new blood-based diagnostic tools, meaning FDA clearance alone does not ensure beneficiaries can access them through the program. The ASAP Act would modernize that process, creating a pathway for qualifying screening tests to be considered for coverage.

Americans are ready for that shift. According to polling