Speakers at a Capitol Hill forum warned on Wednesday that Medicare outlays to treat Alzheimer’s will grow, within two decades, to $400 billion a year — roughly the size of Medicare’s total budget now. What looms, they said, is potential devastation to the nation’s health care system analogous to that of Hurricane Katrina, and so far, scant attention has been paid to preventing it. But they expressed hope that a new study group led by some high profile freethinkers will start to turn the tide.

Created by the Alzheimer’s Association and House and Senate congressional task forces on the illness, the Alzheimer’s Disease Study Group, led by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. (1979-1999), and former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska (1989-2001), will report its recommendations for revising current federal policies addressing the disease by next spring. “Under your expert leadership, the Alzheimer’s Disease Study Group will play a critical role in bringing the federal government, policy makers, the private sector and consumer groups together to develop a cohesive national strategy to combat Alzheimer’s disease,” Alzheimer’s Association President Harry Johns said in a letter to Gingrich and Kerrey.

The study group’s goal is to cast a fresh eye on current policies by creating a 12-person panel of prominent thinkers to carry out analyses of existing research, prevention and treatment policies and conduct public meetings to share their thinking and collect feedback, said Stephen McConnell, vice president for advocacy at the Alzheimer’s Association. He said that possible members of the new group include health care experts, but also “people with a big view, people who are prominent, who can look at this from a different angle perhaps,” Among those mentioned as possible members are former Congressional Budget Office Director Alice Rivlin, former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mark B. McClellan and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, whose husband suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.

The study group is likely to address one of the Alzheimer’s Association’s big frustrations: how little research money the National Institutes of Health devotes to Alzheimer’s compared with other major medical conditions. For example, the current National Institutes of Health annual budget for research on Alzheimer’s disease totals $634 million, compared with $5.5 billion for cancer, $2.9 billion for HIV/AIDS and $2.1 billion for heart disease, McConnell said. NIH spending for Alzheimer’s research “has been flat and going backwards for the past few years,” he added.

The impact of the disease on caregivers and how to ease that burden also is expected to be a focus of the study group. Johns told the Capitol Hill forum that unpaid caregivers — typically family members or friends — provide about $83 billion per year worth of care to those with Alzheimer’s, but at a tremendous cost to themselves. “They wind up quitting their jobs, losing their health insurance,” and also are at higher risk of death themselves because of the physical and emotional pressures involved in providing care. With 78 million baby boomers soon entering their Medicare years, the current number of people with Alzheimer’s — five million — is expected to triple in coming decades.

“It’s as if something greater than Katrina has begun ... but we have yet to begin investing in the dikes,” Johns said.