President Barack Obama announced plans to spend a $5 billion chunk of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on the medical industry, the Reuters news service reported.
In a speech Sept. 30, Obama said the money, in the form of grants taken from the $787 billion economic stimulus package, will be spent on medical and scientific research, medical supplies and upgrading laboratory capacity.
“This kind of investment will also lead to new jobs: Tens of thousands of jobs conducting research, manufacturing and supplying medical equipment and building and modernizing laboratories and research facilities,” Obama said in an address at the National Institutes of Health.
“If we’re honest, in recent years we’ve seen our leadership slipping as scientific integrity was at times undermined and research funding failed to keep pace,” he said. “We know that the work you do would not get done if left solely to the private sector. Some research does not lend itself to quick profit.”
Here are some of the targets for the grant program, according to Reuters:
- $1 billion for research into the genetic causes of cancer and potential targeted treatments;
- A “large infusion of funds” into research on autism, which affects an estimated 1 in 150 U.S. children;
- $175 million for The Cancer Genome Atlas project to collect 20,000 tissue samples from people with more than 20 different types of cancer.
Baucus aims to wrap up tonight
Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, aims to finish his healthcare reform bill by the end of the day, according to the Wall Street Journal, setting the stage for healthcare reform legislation to hit Congress in mid-October.
His committee is last of five Senate panels to deliver a finished bill; once that’s done, senators can begin integrating the proposals into a single bill to bring to the Senate floor.
Democratic aides told the Journal the House was working on roughly the same timetable, despite months of missed deadlines.
But key provisions have yet to be worked out, including a major sticking point for moderate and conservative legislators: The creation of a government-run public insurance program that would compete with private insurers.
A bill out of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee includes the so-called public option, but the Finance Committee nixed two similar proposals this week.
The option is popular with liberal members of Congress, so much so that House majority leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the body won’t even vote on a bill that doesn’t include it. Whether a House-passed public option survives conference negotiations with the Senate is anyone’s guess, however.
Another, perhaps more problematic issue is how the reforms will be paid for. A proposed 10-year, $40 billion tax on the medical device industry has drawn fire from sources within and outside the industry; the pharmaceutical industry negotiated its own, 480 billion contribution earlier this year.
Besides announcing his $5 billion subsidy for medical research, Obama spent part of the day yesterday lobbying on-the-fence Democrats for support of the Baucus bill.
For his part, the senator seemed confident of his chances.
“It’s clear to me we’re going to get it passed,” Baucus said, according to the Journal.
But support from Democrats on his own committee is far from assured, let alone the chance of votes from the Grand Old Party, as Finance Committee member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) criticized the Baucus bill today lacking the public option.
“This legislation has been stripped of the principles of consumer choice and competition,” Wyden said in a speech at the Tax Policy Center in Washington. “The Congress is about to throw hundreds of billions of dollars of additional money into a broken system.”