In a day when approval of Congress barely exceeds 10 percent of poll respondents and few believe the body ever gets anything meaningful done, the 21st Century Cures Act is, if you will, a remedy of sorts.
The $6.3 billion bipartisan legislation, shepherded through the Senate by Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the body’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, overwhelmingly passed both houses of Congress and was expected to be signed by President Barack Obama.
As with last year’s Every Student Succeeds Act, the Tennessee senator worked with members of the Democratic Party to achieve a bill that, in his words, “will help virtually every American family.”
Before Republicans gained the Senate in 2014, passing such legislation was practically impossible because then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., would not allow such comprehensive bills that weren’t strictly part of Obama’s agenda to see the light of day.
This freshly minted package will, among other things, help bring safe drugs and medical devices into the market more quickly and at less cost than before; provide more funding for cancer research, genetic, lifestyle and environmental variations of disease, and brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s; provide funding to states for the opioid crisis; provide funding for the Food and Drug Administration; improve the electronic heath records system; and address the country’s mental health crisis.