U.S. Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) said the nation’s fight against the opioid crisis takes precedence in his role as chairman of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, where he is pressing members of the panel’s health subcommittee to get statutory support to the floor ASAP.
“Combating the opioid crisis is my top priority as chairman,” Rep. Walden told a science and biopharma industry publication in a March 29 statement. “Time is of the essence and we are working across the aisle to get legislation to the president’s desk as quickly as possible.”
The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health will hold a hearing on April 11 to examine more than one dozen proposed bills related to health insurance coverage, payment issues and Medicare payment regulations for prescription drugs. Rep. Walden said he expects colleagues to get a legislative package to the House floor for a vote by May 24, when Congress breaks for the Memorial Day holiday.
“It’s part of our bipartisan, comprehensive effort to deliver relief to every American community, which continues to battle this costly epidemic,” he told STAT.
The April 11 hearing will be the last on the topic during the current legislative session. It follows a two-day hearing held on March 21 and 22 in which House health subcommittee members considered 25 bipartisan prevention and public health solutions to the opioid epidemic. Also since Rep. Walden launched the full committee’s anti-opioid legislative push in February, the health subcommittee that month reviewed eight additional bills related to patient safety and enforcement tools.
“The unprecedented plague of opioid addiction and substance use disorder in our country requires an unprecedented response,” Walden said in his opening statement during the March 21 health subcommittee hearing. “We can and must do more to meet this growing need.”
Similar efforts are under way in the U.S. Senate, where Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), chairman of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, also has held hearings related to proposed opioid legislation. On March 26 the senator released two discussion drafts of legislation to improve the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) ability to address the opioid crisis.
“The Senate health committee has held six bipartisan hearings so far this Congress on nearly every aspect of the opioids crisis, to inform legislation to better help states and communities on the front lines. I want to ensure that the Food and Drug Administration has every tool it needs to fight the opioid crisis, and the draft legislation released today will take the next step towards making that possible,” Sen. Alexander said last week.
With November midterm elections bearing down on Congress, both chambers are expected to approve bipartisan legislation on substance use and recovery issues before campaign season starts, according to Walden’s staff.
Approximately $4 billion in federal funding was earmarked to address the epidemic as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, H.R. 1625, which President Donald Trump signed into law last month to fund the federal government. The appropriations spending package directs nearly $2 billion in state grants for treatment and prevention programs, and directs funds to the National Institutes of Health for research and to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to collect data, among other purposes.