House lawmakers want to sell crude oil reserves to pay for a billion-dollar bill aimed at hastening the development of new health treatments for the public.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee proposed selling 8 million barrels of crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to pay for the 21st Century Cures Act. The committee advanced the bill to the full House by a unanimous vote on Thursday.
The offset would be out of the ordinary since the authority to withdraw crude oil from the reserve must be made by the president. The last time the reserve was tapped was in 2011 when President Obama sold 30 million barrels to the private market to offset supply disruptions in the Middle East, the Department of Energy said.
The reserve has a capacity of 727 million barrels, and in 2013 held nearly 700 million barrels.
The bill would give the National Institutes of Health $10 billion in new funding over the next five years.
It also boosts funding for the Food and Drug Administration by $550 million over the next five years. An earlier version had no new money for the agency, even though it will be saddled with new responsibilities.
The bill aims to get needed medicines to the public faster and seeks to streamline clinical trials.
The legislation also would give additional market exclusivity if an approved drug is modified to treat a rare disease. The drug maker would get an additional six-month monopoly and prevent any generic copycats of the product to reach the market.
It would also create a new regulatory pathway to swiftly approve medical devices that treat a life-threatening disease.
A new part of the bill would shield industry-paid FDA user fees from any future sequester-related spending caps. The agency said it has lost more than $80 million in user-fee funding due to sequestration.
In addition to the funding, the latest version of the bill introduced Thursday proposes several Medicare reforms. For instance, the bill seeks to limit payments starting in 2017 for X-rays in an effort to transition to digital radiography.
