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A spending bill that would give a 24% funding boost to HHS healthcare research, public health preparedness and workforce training programs cleared the House Appropriations Committee Thursday. HHS would get $120 billion in the bill, a significant increase compared to the the budgets approved during President Donald Trump's administration. The funding measure still must pass the House and Senate. (Hellmann, 7/15)

The Senate left town Thursday with the fate of a bipartisan infrastructure package uncertain, despite Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's attempt to force it forward by advancing a floor vote next week. Schumer has scheduled the vote for next Wednesday, a hardball tactic Democrats hope will allow them to pass President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda before the August recess. But negotiators face several outstanding issues, both on funding mechanisms and spending priorities. (Levin and Everett, 7/15)

New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez isn't ready to commit to voting for a budget blueprint that will count on hundreds of billions of dollars extracted from the prescription drug industry to help offset $3.5 trillion in new spending over a decade. “I’m not ready to make any decisions on the budget resolution,” Menendez said Thursday in a brief interview. He reiterated his concerns that Democrats’ plans to have Medicare negotiate drug prices will be a tax on pharmaceutical companies and that savings won’t be passed onto consumers. (McPherson, Clason, and Lerman, 7/15)

Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), a crucial centrist vote in the Democratic caucus, is signaling to colleagues that he won’t derail a $3.5 trillion budget resolution that contains many of President Biden’s legislative priorities. Senate Democrats say Manchin has indicated he will not stand in the way of the measure moving forward and will be generally supportive as long as he’s kept in the loop on his top concerns: how to pay for the bill and a clean energy provision. (Bolton, 7/16)

President Joe Biden's latest executive order promoting competition in the U.S. economy could be a boon to private equity and disrupt the medical profession's long-standing guilds, depending on how far federal officials want to take matters. The order empowers federal agencies to use existing federal law to lower healthcare costs, particularly prescription drugs. While few healthcare-specific measures seem groundbreaking on the surface, they contain warning signs of potential profound change. (Brady, 7/15)

With greater awareness of deficits in the nation’s public health infrastructure since the pandemic and the Biden administration’s willingness to spend billions to improve the health and welfare of Americans, drowning prevention may finally get the attention and investment it deserves, said Richard Hamburg, executive director of Safe States Alliance. The CDC, he said, may for the first time receive funding for drowning prevention that can be allocated to state public health agencies to save lives. A subcommittee of the U.S. House is slated to vote July 15 on a bill that would appropriate $2 million for drowning prevention. (Vestal, 7/15)

Health systems could reduce supply chain costs if third-party companies were permitted to repair medical devices, as President Joe Biden's executive order directs. Biden issued a sweeping antitrust-related executive order on July 9 that, in part, seeks to make it easier and cheaper for consumers to repair their own products or to pay a third party to do so. Biden's order targets manufacturers that only allow them to fix their products at prices they set. Healthcare providers could try to amend their current arrangements with medical devicemakers to eliminate that restriction, which could reduce maintenance costs, supply chain experts said. (Kacik, 7/15)

KHN: KHN’s ‘What The Health?’: Here Comes Reconciliation

The expansion of health benefits is a major piece of the tentative budget deal reached this week by Democrats in Congress. They plan to press ahead — without Republican support — on a bill that could expand Medicare, extend the generous premium subsidies for the Affordable Care Act and provide options for people with low incomes who have been shut out of coverage in states that didn’t expand Medicaid. It could be paid for, at least in part, by changes aimed at reducing prescription drug prices. But that assumes Democrats can reach an agreement on the details, because the bill cannot pass without every Democrat in the Senate and nearly every Democrat in the House. (7/15)

Francis Collins is ready for the National Institutes of Health to fail spectacularly. At least, he’s ready for a few of the agency’s potential new projects to go up in flames: the high-risk, high-reward pursuits that would come out of a new research wing that President Biden has proposed. The potential for earth-shattering successes makes the proposed new agency a risk worth taking, Collins said during an interview at STAT’s Breakthrough Science Summit. (Facher, 7/15)