Healthcare Updates in Omnibus Spending Bill, by the Numbers

March 29, 2018

Pardon Our Dust

We recently launched this new site and are still in the process of updating some of our archived content. Some details of this article may be incomplete, links may be broken, and other elements may not display properly yet. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

A $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill was signed into law March 23, 2018. Here’s how the spending package affects the healthcare industry, by the numbers.

$3.6 billion

  

Additional spending on opioid-addiction and mental health services:

  • $500 million for the National Institutes of Health, including money for researching non-addictive pain killers
  • $500 million for state opioid grants under the 21st Century Cures Act
  • $330 million for law enforcement grant programs, including those authorized by the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act
  • $476 million for Health and Human Services grants to help fight the opioid crisis, including funding for state Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs and the National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting system
Provided to Health and Human Services in budget authority, $10 billion more than the 2017 level $78 billion
$1.1 billion Added funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

  • $45 million added to the CDC’s Public Health Preparedness and Response programs
  • $480 million for construction of a new biosafety lab to support biodefense research
  • $475 million to prescription overdose prevention activities — an increase of $350 million to help fight the opioid epidemic, with $10 million dedicated to an opioid abuse awareness campaign
Cut to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, amounting to a less than 1 percent cut  $3 million
$4 billion  

To the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for administrative expenses, the same as last year

For details on the bill, read the full Washington Healthcare Update from March 26, 2018.