Obama seals $6.3 billion 21st Century Cures Act
pharmafile | December 14, 2016 | News story | Medical Communications, Research and Development | Biden, Obama, US, congress
President Barack Obama put pen to paper on the 21st Century Cures Act on 13 December, which commits to investing $6.3 billion in new spending on a wide range of health related issues over the next decade. Perhaps the biggest commitment is the $1.8 billion investment in cancer research, in Vice President Joe Biden’s “moonshot” that aims to “win the war on cancer”. The bill encompasses a broad range of health related issues, including research and funding upon cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, opioid addiction, medical devices, mental health issues, and access to new drugs.
The new law passed through the House of Representatives and the Senate with strong bipartisan support, an unusual occurrence during Obama’s term in office. A large portion of the figure of $6.3 billion will be diverted into the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for research including the “moonshot”, the Precision Medicine Initiative, the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, and regenerative medicine. The bill also contains provisions for supporting mental health by creating a new position for Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use, who will oversee mental health programs across the federal government.
“It’s not always easy to remember, but being able to honor those we’ve lost in this way and to know that we may be able to prevent other families from feeling that same loss, that makes it a good day,” Obama said on the signing of the bill. “It’s a good day to see us doing our jobs.”
There is a personal element to the bill for both Obama and Biden as they prepare to leave office. Obama lost his mother to cancer when she was in her early 50s while Biden recently lost his son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015. With the bill receiving bipartisan support, as only five senators voted against it, there was a considerable feel-good factor of signing the deal and it was used as a platform by Obama to subtly back his own healthcare reforms from future tampering. He said, “I’m hopeful in the years ahead that Congress keeps working together in a bipartisan fashion to move us forward, rather than backward in support of the health of our people”.
It is worth noting that two of the senators who voted against the bill are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, both notable figures having considerable public support within the US’s political left.
Bernie Sanders took exception with the bill by continuing in a similar vein to statements made recently in the press and on Twitter attacking the pharmaceutical industry. He is quoted as saying, “The greed of the pharmaceutical industry has no limit, and this bill includes numerous corporate giveaways that will make drug companies even richer… It’s time for Congress to stand up to the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, not give them more handouts.” In particular, this could be referencing the fact that the FDA process of new drug validations could be streamlined to be based upon “real world evidence”, as opposed to the traditional methods of clinical trialling. This would massively decrease the cost of finding new indications for drugs and therefore is a welcome change for the pharma industry.
Elizabeth Warren was also staunchly critical in her views upon the bill. She claimed that the bill had originally been well-intentioned but that congress had “let Big Pharma hijack the Cures bill”. In the full statement, she claimed that: “This final deal has only a tiny fig leaf of funding, for NIH and for the opioid crisis. And most of that fig leaf isn’t even real. Most of the money won’t really be there unless future Congresses passes future bills in future years to spend those dollars. Why bother with a fig leaf in the Cures bill? Why pretend to give any money to NIH or opioids? Because this funding is political cover for huge giveaways to giant drug companies.”
The optimism surrounding this bill is somewhat tempered by these criticisms but those suffering from or affected by cancer can take hope in the $1.8 billion that will be devoted to cancer research. Biden said, “Every day, millions of people are praying, praying for hope, praying for time”. In this 1000-page piece of complicated legislation, that is what the “moonshot” can offer: hope for a cure.
Ben Hargreaves
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