Congress Approves Health Spending Bill

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Thursday December 20 1:10 PM ET

Congress Approves Health Spending Bill

By Rovner

WASHINGTON (Reuters Health) - The US Senate Thursday gave final approval to the

fiscal 2002 spending bill for the Department of Health and Human Services (news

- web sites). The 90-7 vote to send the bill to President Bush (news - web

sites) followed House approval Wednesday by a vote of 393-30.

There was little dissent in either chamber over the bill, which grants most

health programs substantial increases over both last year's totals and the

amounts requested by President Bush in his budget.

The only expressions of disappointment came from backers of a mental health

``parity'' provision that was included in the Senate bill, but which was dropped

at the insistence of House Republican negotiators. The provision would have

required that insurance plans that cover mental health services cover them to

the same extent as all other services. Instead, negotiators agreed to reinstate

a more limited parity law--one requiring only that health plans not have unequal

annual and lifetime dollar limits for mental health services than for other

services--which expired at the end of September.

``The House leadership has bowed to the pressure of insurers and big business,''

said Sen. Kennedy, D-Mass. Because the bill enjoys such strong support in

both the House and Senate, said Kennedy, dropping it means that ``the collective

will of the Congress has been flagrantly disregarded.''

Kennedy and other backers said they will try again next year. ``Equal treatment

for the mentally ill is not just an insurance issue. It's a civil rights

issue,'' he said.

The biggest increase in the bill--$2.99 billion--goes to the National Institutes

of Health (news - web sites), boosting its total to $23.3 billion. The 15%

increase is slightly less than the Senate approved in its version of the bill,

and slightly less than the amount needed to keep NIH on the trajectory to have

its funding doubled from its fiscal 1998 level by next year. But Sen. Tom

Harkin, D-Iowa, chairman of the Senate subcommittee that wrote the bill, said

the added money that will go to NIH from a bioterrorism initiative included in

the Defense Department spending bill will make up the difference.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (news - web sites), ground zero

in the nation's war on bioterrorism, would get an 11% increase, to $4.3 billion.

The CDC, however, is also scheduled to receive more funding in the bioterrorism

package.

A program to help children's hospitals with the cost of training interns and

residents also received a double digit funding boost, to $285 million, as did

community health centers, one of President Bush's top health priorities. That

program will receive $1.34 billion, an increase of 15%.

The Title X federal family planning program would receive a boost of $11

million, to $265 million, while funding for abstinence education would double to

$40 million. Funding for the White AIDS (news - web sites) programs would

rise by 6% to $1.9 billion, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services

Administration would receive the same increase of 6% to a total of $3.1 billion.