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July 19, 2018
WASHINGTON – Yesterday, U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (Mo.), Chairman of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (Labor/HHS), spoke on the Senate floor to discuss efforts he’s led to prioritize resources to combat the opioid epidemic. Blunt noted that the Labor/HHS funding bill for this year includes $3.7 billion for health-related opioid programs, marking the fourth year of targeted investments in programs to help prevent, treat, and recover from an opioid use disorder.
The funding bill includes $1.5 billion for state opioid response grants, which provide flexible funding for states to implement programs that best fit their needs. Missouri received $10 million in state opioid response grant funding last year, and is eligible for $28 million this year. Following is a snapshot of how last year’s federal grant funding has helped Missouri combat the opioid crisis:
More information on the opioid-related programs funded in the FY2019 Labor/HHS appropriations bill is available here.
Following are Excerpts from Blunt’s Remarks:
“In virtually every state and certainly in the country, more people die now from drug overdoses than die from car accidents. ... So the appropriations bill that our committee has voted out, that we're eager to get to the floor, includes $3.7 billion targeted on the opioid epidemic. This is about … a 1,300 percent increase over where we were four years ago as the Congress became more aware of not only how widespread the epidemic was, but the incredible human cost of the epidemic. The bill includes almost half of that money, $1.5 billion, for state opioid response grants. One reason we're doing this with grants is we really don't know yet all of the options and we haven't been able to evaluate the best ways to deal with this. We do feel like, in our committee and in the Congress, that it's unlikely that the best way to deal with this in one place is necessarily the best way to deal with it in other places.
“My state, Missouri, received $10 million last year. We'll receive $28 million this year if this grant funding is approved. And other states will be proportionately, they'll go up exactly as we did. Now what did we do in Missouri to use that money in our state to see what you can do to deal with this epidemic? 1,700 people have received evidence-based medical treatment for opioid use disorder. 1,700 people in the last few months received that. More than 4,300 kits of naloxone, which is what you take when you've overdosed… Around 4,000 people have received training on what to do in the event of an overdose. About 10,000 people have received training in our state on topics from treatment to prevention to recovery. For a state like ours, the rate of opioid death has increased. Opioid overdose deaths has more than quadrupled in the past 15 years. That would not be an unusual number for states to see.
“In West Virginia, Senator Capito and I were here on the floor talking about this earlier this year. This is not necessarily an urban problem. In fact, in most cases it's more of a rural problem per capita than an urban problem per capita. And we've set aside money targeted for those rural communities. Of the $135 million targeted for rural communities based in different things that appear to be needed more in rural communities than other communities, a couple hundred million dollars goes into community health centers to support people and their behavioral health concerns, their mental health concerns. If you don’t have a mental health problem before you get addicted to opioids, you have one once you’ve gotten addicted to opioids. …
“Senator Stabenow and I introduced a bill a few years ago, the Excellence in Mental Health Act, and eight of our states now have situations where they're treating, in that eight-state pilot, where they're treating behavioral health like all other health. … Dealing with mental health and behavioral health in the same way matters in all cases, but it particularly seems to apply as people try to beat this addiction.
“The Department of Labor and Health and Human Services bill includes $60 million for child abuse prevention and treatment programs to support what happens in families when somebody in that family gets into an abuse situation.
“The number of people that become addicted needs to change, but also how we deal with pain needs to change. And so some unique money available to the National Institutes of Health to try to develop a pain medicine that's non-addictive, $500 million into that effort.
“Mr. President, I just say that in all of these cases, we feel like we've produced a good bill out of our committee. … Everybody ought to have a chance on this floor to say, no, I think this money would be better spent here than here, better spent this way than that way, and for every single senator to be able to be part of that discussion. If we continue this process that we have been in for a few years, one big bill that nobody ever gets to vote on, that means that the senators who aren't on the Appropriations Committee don't have a say in establishing our national priorities. It's an important time to do that. These bills are all out of committee and have been for almost a month now. We have had three of them on the floor already. I think we plan to have four of them on the floor next week, and maybe defense and Labor/H not too long after that. But these are big issues that every senator should have a say in, and the only way that happens is if these issues are decided right here on the floor. And so, Mr. President, hopefully we'll set some recent records at least of having all those bills on the floor and debated.”
