Senate Democrats pledged to tie up a group of health innovation bills if Republicans don’t agree to more funding for medical research.
A Senate panel advanced seven bills that speed up the approval of drugs and devices after a debate over whether to give the National Institutes of Health more mandatory funding.
“Let me be clear. Until we have a concrete deal with significant, guaranteed investments for medical research, health innovation legislation will not leave the floor of the Senate,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., during the markup hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
But Republicans balked at the idea of more mandatory funding for NIH instead of discretionary funds. Mandatory funding has to be appropriated each year while discretionary funds can be changed.
“My own view is mandatory funding should not be a substitute for discretionary funding,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the HELP committee.
Alexander and other Republicans questioned how the funding would be paid for.
The House last year passed the 21st Century Cures Act, which included $10 billion in new funding for NIH over five years. House lawmakers planned to pay for that by selling off oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
But Alexander appeared cool to such a move, saying the House has “zero way” to pay for the new funding.
Democrats charged that NIH needs a reliable funding stream. Congress gave NIH a $2 billion increase in funding last year as part of the omnibus spending bill.
“We are looking for something that is sustainable over time,” Warren said.
About a decade ago, Congress doubled the NIH’s budget but didn’t keep it up, she noted.
“What happened after we doubled it? We just kept cutting back and cutting back on the spending,” she said.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said he wants to make sure that NIH is accountable for allocating the funding where it is supposed to go,and worries that if Congress gives it mandatory spending, it may lose some of that power to review accountability.
Warren rejected that notion. “Mandatory funding is all targeted funding,” she said.
The seven bills address a plethora of health innovation topics. One measure creates a new pathway for breakthrough medical devices to be approved faster by the Food and Drug Administration, while another hopes to entice drug makers to create treatments for the Zika virus.
