{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["http://degette.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/cures-act-gains-bipartisan-support-that-eluded-obama-health-law", "Cures Act Gains Bipartisan Support That Eluded Obama Health Law", "2016-12-09", "2016", "2016-12", "Democrat", "House", "CO", "Diana DeGette", "D000197", "degette.house.gov", null, null, "legacy", "WASHINGTON \u2014 With self-congratulatory zeal and smiles all around, huge bipartisan majorities in Congress have just passed legislation to speed the discovery of cures for killer diseases. At the same time, Republican leaders have been devising a strategy to undo the Affordable Care Act, which has done more than any law in a generation to treat people with those diseases.\n\u201cIt is a real contradiction,\u201d said Dr. Otis W. Brawley, the chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society.\nIn recent years, few major bills have commanded as much support as the 21st Century Cures Act, which sailed to passage by votes of\u00a0392 to 26\u00a0in the House on Nov. 30, and\u00a094 to 5\u00a0in the Senate a week later. Once it is signed by President Obama on Tuesday, as the White House has said it will be, the law will allow for money to be pumped into biomedical research and speed the approval of new drugs and medical devices. It also includes provisions to improve\u00a0mental health\u00a0care and combat opioid abuse.\n\u201cThis is the most significant legislation passed by this Congress,\u201d the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said on Thursday. By contrast, he once referred to the 2010 health law as \u201cthe single worst piece of legislation that has been passed in the last half-century.\u201d\nEllen V. Sigal, the chairwoman of Friends of\u00a0Cancer\u00a0Research, an advocacy group, said \u201cthere\u2019s a disconnect\u201d between efforts to pass the Cures Act and to repeal the Affordable Care Act.\n\u201cMost people voting and lobbying on Capitol Hill have\u00a0health insurance,\u201d Ms. Sigal said. \u201cIntellectually, they may know that some people are suffering without insurance. But do they have empathy? Those who are insured may not emotionally understand what it is like for those who are not insured. We live in our own bubble.\u201d\nLawmakers have their own explanations.\nFor one thing, the two health care efforts vastly differ in size. At a cost of $6.3 billion, the Cures Act is not small, but the Affordable Care Act cost hundreds of billions of dollars and affected every facet of medicine \u2014 from insurance coverage to delivery of care. It was bound to be more difficult to enact.\nThe Republican authors of the Cures Act \u2014 Representative Fred Upton of Michigan and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee \u2014 went to great lengths to work closely with Democrats, led by Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado and Senator Patty Murray of Washington. The cooperation paid off.\n\u201cWe had bipartisan buy-in from Day 1,\u201d Ms. DeGette said.\nBy contrast, the Affordable Care Act was\u00a0adopted in 2010\u00a0without a single Republican vote \u2014 either because, as Democrats have said, Republicans refused to cooperate; or, as Republicans have said, because it was jammed down their throats.\n\u201cWe have been like the Hatfields and McCoys ever since, shooting each other,\u201d Mr. Alexander said.\nMr. Alexander, deeply frustrated by his dealings with the Obama White House in 2010, learned from that experience. \u201cThe next administration or the next Congress will not be repealing the Cures Act,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause we have taken the time to work out our differences, and create a consensus of support.\u201d\nThe American Cancer Society supported both the Affordable Care Act and the current biomedical research bill, and sees the two efforts as intertwined.\n\u201cThe Cures bill includes incredibly important reforms to get treatments to people faster,\u201d said Dr. Brawley, the top medical officer at the society. But he added, \u201cWe need to get those treatments to all people faster,\u201d and he emphasized the word \u201call.\u201d\nThe surge in spending on medical research will almost surely lead to new treatments, which could include some extraordinarily expensive drug therapies. To get such treatments, patients would need to have not just insurance, but good insurance coverage. (Some drug companies offer prescription assistance programs to help defray the costs.) A repeal of the Affordable Care Act could leave millions without access to the benefits of the biomedical research bill, Democrats have said.\nAnother factor in passage of the Cures Act was the relentless advocacy of Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, who helped lawmakers appreciate the possibility of a golden age of medicine \u2014 with an artificial pancreas for diabetics, a vaccine for\u00a0AIDS\u00a0and the use of\u00a0stem cells\u00a0to repair damaged heart tissue.\nRepresentative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, said: \u201cMy secretary of defense is Francis Collins, because the true enemy of each and every one of us isn\u2019t somebody in South Korea or somebody in Iran or ISIS. It\u2019s cancer, it\u2019s Alzheimer\u2019s, it\u2019s AIDS, it\u2019s\u00a0diabetes, it\u2019s heart disease \u2014 all those dreadful, awful diseases that N.I.H. is looking for cures for.\u201d\nEven as Congress wrapped up approval of the Cures Act this week, Republicans were having serious discussions about how to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act without interrupting coverage for the newly insured. Republicans say they feel an obligation to move fast, because the law is crushing many families and small businesses with high costs.\nDemocrats say some Republicans want to repeal the president\u2019s signature legislative achievement just because it is called Obamacare. It would be \u201ca poke in his eye politically,\u201d said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, who warned that a repeal could be \u201ccatastrophic to tens of millions of Americans.\u201d\nThe Cures Act would also increase access to mental health care, which has been a bipartisan goal since the fatal shootings in 2012 of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.\nBut Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said the benefits of the mental health provisions \u201cwill be far outweighed by the catastrophic harm caused by individuals with mental illness if the Republicans move forward with their radical plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act.\u201d\nSponsors of the Cures Act toured the country, visited clinics, held hearings and listened to patients who recounted their struggles with cancer, Alzheimer\u2019s and dozens of other diseases. Patients and their well-organized advocacy groups proved to be more effective than the uninsured in lobbying Congress.\nIn debates on the Affordable Care Act, lawmakers have continually fought over the proper role of the federal government.\nRepublicans see the need for a federal role in conducting research and regulating drugs, but not in regulating the details of health insurance. Under the 2010 law, they have said, the Obama administration has issued so many regulations, bulletins, official policy statements and informal \u201cguidance documents\u201d that not even federal officials can keep track of them all.\nDemocrats have said the federal standards are needed to guarantee universal access to \u201cessential health benefits,\u201d and to prevent insurers from discriminating against those who are sick.", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["http://degette.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/cures-act-gains-bipartisan-support-that-eluded-obama-health-law"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.826133880764246, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}