Things got heated on the Senate floor March 22 when Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chairman of the Senate’s health committee, railed against Democrats for refusing to support his ObamaCare stabilization plan, which never made it into the omnibus.
While it started off as a bipartisan endeavor between Alexander and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), Democrats said they couldn’t support it after Republicans added in Hyde language, a long-standing amendment applied to other health programs that restricts the use of federal funding for abortions.
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn also promised the Senate would vote on the bill.
The $1.3 trillion package, posted around 8 p.m. March 21, does include a range of other health measures:
- $10 million funding boost for abstinence education
- A $3 billion increase for NIH medical research
- A $2.3 billion increase in funding for child care for low-income working families.
- And a multibillion-dollar boost to combat the opioid epidemic—about $4 billion, much of which is new money this year.
- A $1.1 billion increase for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, bringing the total to $8.3 billion.
Overall, HHS would receive $78 billion, a $10 billion funding increase compared to FY17 levels.
Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services Administrator Seema Verma talked to reporters, and made some ObamaCare news.
Verma told a roundtable of reporters on March 22 that the administration will try to help prevent “bare counties,” with no ObamaCare insurers offering coverage for 2019.
She said the Trump administration would not sit back and blame ObamaCare.
Meanwhile, the House passed the “right to try” bill on experimental drugs largely along party lines.
The bill passed handedly in a 267-149 vote. It was the second time the measure had come up for a vote on the floor, but this time, a simple majority vote was needed. Thirty-five Democrats voted for the bill, and two Republicans opposed it.
The House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee wrapped up two days of back-to-back hearings on prevention and public health bills.
And several Republican lawmakers are pushing for tougher sentencing for traffickers of a powerful synthetic opioid called fentanyl (it’s up to 50 times more potent than heroin).
Fentanyl is “as much a weapon of mass destruction as it is a drug,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) said at a press conference, holding up a nearly empty salt shaker and explaining how that amount—less than 40 grams—of fentanyl could kill thousands of people.
Federal mandatory minimums for fentanyl kick in after trafficking 40 grams or more.
So Cotton, along with five other GOP senators, introduced a bill March 22 that would reduce the amount of fentanyl required for mandatory minimum sentences to apply. The effort, senators said, is aimed at taking into account the synthetic drug’s potency—which is up to 50 times more powerful than heroin.
