Dive Brief:
- Legislators are caught in an impasse in their efforts to prepare a bill that would support medical innovation priorities including cancer and precision medicine.
- Although medical innovation has bipartisan support, the issue is funding; Democrats are demanding the bill include guaranteed funding for research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), while Republicans would keep it dependent upon annual appropriations to be sure the costs will be offset, reports The Hill.
- The Health Committee is said to be cooperating to reach on agreement on the matter of funding, with Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) working with ranking member Patty Murray (D-WA).
Dive Insight:
Compromise may be tricky to achieve given Republicans are split on the matter of mandatory funding. The Hill reports Alexander is willing to consider it if the funding is tied to the agreed priorities, while Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), another committee member and Republican leader on healthcare, opposes it.
Alexander has suggested NIH funding could be packaged with the approximately 50 proposals being considered. Much of the mission of the bill would be to increase the speed at which the FDA is able to approve new drugs and medical devices.
“I’d like to take to [Senate Majority Leader] McConnell a consensus on the 50 ideas that we have here and the consensus on a surge of funding for the National Institutes of Health at the same time and present them to him and say, ‘There it is, it’s bipartisan. It’s sufficiently bipartisan that you can put it on the floor,’” Alexander told the media last week.