WASHINGTON -- Senators voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to approve a $6.3 billion bill to boost spending for medical research on cancer and other diseases, as well as address the mental health crisis and opioid epidemic in the country.
The 94-5 vote on the 21st Century Cures Act, which was named in honor of Vice President Joe Biden's son Beau Biden, who died last year of brain cancer, came in the waning days of the Congress, which is expected to wrap up its work for the year this week.
"This medical innovation bill will help foster solutions when it comes to heartbreaking illnesses like Alzheimer's, opioid addiction, mental health disorders and cancer --- heartbreaking illnesses that affect our family, and friends, and constituents," said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. "This is one of the most meaningful bills we'll pass this year."
Having already passed the House, the bill will now go to President Barack Obama, who is expected to sign it.
The bipartisan measure provides $4.8 billion for the National Institutes for Health for medical research, $500 million for the Food and Drug Administration to help speed the approval of drugs, $1 billion in grants for states to battle the opioid crisis and includes provisions to address mental health issues.
"This historic vote is one of the rare moments in Congress where members can say with confidence their vote to pass these reforms will indeed save lives. We are ending the era of stigma surrounding mental illness and focusing on delivering treatment before tragedy," said Sen. Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, who worked on the mental health provisions in the bill.
On Monday, while advocated for the bill's passage, Murphy spoke on the Senate floor. He said:
In my tiny little state, only 1 percent of the nation's population, we're going to have over 800 people die this year from drug overdoses. And yeah, we need to get to the source of that epidemic, stop people from getting addicted to pain medications in the first place, but boy, we have an awful lot of people showing up with overdoses in our emergency rooms that have no place to go--no detox programs, no long-term residential programs--this $1 billion, it's authorized in this legislation to fight the opioid epidemic. That's going to save lives in my little state.
Murphy worked with people on both sides of the aisle, as well as Sandy Hook Promise, to get the legislation passed.
"For nearly four years, SHP has worked tirelessly to pass mental health reform legislation to ensure that those in distress have access to the services they need. This is a tremendous victory for the organization," Sandy Hook Promise said in a statement.
The opioid epidemic has hit Connecticut particularly hard over the past several years. In 2012 there were 357 total accidental drug intoxication deaths in the state of Connecticut. By 2015 there were 729. And in just the first three months of 2016, there were 208, leading officials to predict a 2016 total of 832. That's a 233 percent increase in just four years.
Some liberal senators, like Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, complained the bill had too much in it for the pharmaceutical industry. But their complaints didn't resonate with most of their colleagues who saw the bill as carefully negotiated and significant because it addressed several lingering medical research problems.
The bill also cuts red tape for drug and medical device approval.
The vote was a feel-good sendoff off for the GOP-led Congress and Obama and Biden who will leave the White House in a few weeks.
