While the nation's attention is focused on Manhattan's Trump Tower trying to read the tea leaves about who will serve as the new president's hired hands, some Boston-area lawmakers are taking a stab at trying to make the end of the Congressional session productive.
The lame duck session of the 114th Congress begins this week, and ends in mid-December; it is three quick weeks to wrap up any remaining legislative business.
Call them crazy, but some think there’s a chance of significant legislation—possibly a big, bundled health bill package could come together in the U.S. Senate and become law, in a big flurry of action after two years of work.
If it does, it could hold numerous benefits to the region.
Here’s what seems to be happening. First, there is a big push in the Senate to pass the 21st Century Cures Act, which seeks to facilitate a quicker path to market for drugs and medical devices. It’s a wide-ranging set of measures, which passed the House on a strong bipartisan vote, 344-77, way back in July, 2015—with yes votes from every New England representative except Rose DeLaura of Connecticut.
The Senate, however, then split the complicated bill into a bunch of parts, through several committees, and is just now looking to patch it all back together and get it to President Barack Obama.
National Public Radio reported that it is one of the most actively lobbied bills in Congress for this entire two-year session.
That includes plenty of interests in and around Massachusetts. Not only are there plenty of biopharmaceutical and medical device companies doing business in the area, there are also lots of research hospitals and institutions eager to get more funding.
How much funding, however, is the rub. The House version contained roughly $9 billion over five years in mandatory funding for the National Institute of Health (NIH). The Senate version heading to the floor Wednesday reportedly cuts that nearly in half, and takes some of that money away from ObamaCare-related funds.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has led the charge to include more NIH funding in the bill—and no wonder. In 2015 Massachusetts received $2.5 billion of NIH funding, behind only California.
Since many liberals aren’t happy with the industry-friendly regulatory reforms in the bill, the lower NIH funding figure might cost votes like Warren’s in the Senate—and could also cost scores of Democratic votes in the House as well. The lack of pharmaceutical price control measures doesn’t help either.
That brings us to part two of the story. To shore up those weak flanks, it now appears that Senate leaders will, on Wednesday, seek to add a couple of amendments to the package.
One is a billion dollars in funding to combat the national opioid epidemic—an enormous problem in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, among other places.
This past Tuesday, Senators Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and two others sent an open letter to Senate leaders. http://www.shaheen.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/161122%20-%20Opioid%20Funding%20Letter%20Leadership.pdf It looks like, after a long, frustrating battle, they have finally found the opening to get this funding.
But there’s more. The Senate will reportedly also vote to add a mental health bill to the package. A version of that bill, written after Connecticut’s 2013 Sandy Hook tragedy, passed the House with only two dissenting votes this July. Chris Murphy of Connecticut has been a top driver of mental health legislation in the Senate.
Democrats will be asked, apparently, to swallow considerable changes, seen as a watering-down of what the House passed.
But if a conglomeration of all these different pieces can get enough lawmakers to yes—quickly enough for both chambers to pass the same version before the end of the lame duck session—there should be a Presidential signature waiting at the finish line.
That’s because the bill includes money for the so-called “moonshot” against cancer, being headed by Vice President Joe Biden, and Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative.
And then, a “New Agenda”?
Health research may or may not get that boost in the final throes of 2016. Regardless, Senator Susan Collins of Maine wants it at the top of the to-do list for 2017.
Collins—who will be the only Republican Senator northeast of Pennsylvania beginning next year—could play a large role in shaping legislation beginning next year. A Republican President and Republican-held House of Representatives might want to plow forward with a right-wing agenda, but with a slim Republican majority in the Senate, those plans could get held up by moderate Republicans such as Collins—what few remain like her.
So, while others in the GOP are talking about ObamaCare repeal, regulation roll-backs, and Medicare privatization, Collins has laid out a more centrist path forward.
Calling it her “New Agenda for America,” Collins is pointing to four policies she believes Congress can work with President Donald Trump on—with broad support from voters.
First on her list, which Collins unveiled earlier this month in a speech to the Lewiston Auburn Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, is investment in biomedical research.
Second is rebuilding infrastructure—a top Trump agenda item, which Republicans in Congress are already embracing. Collins, who chairs the Transportation Subcommittee of the influential Senate Appropriations Committee, has plenty of ideas of where some of that infrastructure money should go: the Lewiston Auburn Sun Journal reports that she raised the possibility of Lewiston-to-Montreal train route.
Tax code reform is the third item on Collins’s list. The fourth and final one is anti-poverty legislation—for which she naturally favors the approach taken in her own Two-Generation Economic Empowerment Act.
.
