HHS funding bill advances to full Senate

For the second straight year, the appropriations bill covering HHS and its related agencies has been passed out of a Senate committee.

With only one member, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., voting against the bill, Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., hailed it was the first “bipartisan” health appropriations bill in seven years.

“This bill prioritizes critical investments in biomedical research, increasing National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding by $2 billion to help accelerate progress toward life-saving cures,” Blunt said in a statement.

Along with the additional funding for NIH, the bill includes an extra $261 million over last year for opioid abuse treatment and prevention, a $461 million increase for research on antibiotic resistance, and a total of $1.39 billion for Alzheimer’s research.

The legislation has often been held back by partisan disagreements over funding elements of the Affordable Care Act. While the bill continues to limit the ACA’s risk-corridor payments to insurers (which were the subject of several recent lawsuits against the federal government) by requiring the program be budget-neutral and eliminates funding for the Independent Payment Advisory Board (which has never been set up), it avoids past attempts to defund the ACA, helping it garner Democratic support.

“I am very glad that this bill doesn’t include any new policy riders that would have poisoned the bill and made it partisan,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

The House, however, is likely offer a smaller amount of funding to HHS. Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., chairman of the House Labor-HHS appropriations subcommittee, said the extra $2 billion for NIH in the Senate might be too high.

"I'm not sure we can reach there in our initial bill, but we might be able to do that in our negotiations," Cole told The Hill. "We both agree this is an area of national priority, we need to keep the investments going.”