WASHINGTON – A year ago, President Joe Biden used his first state of the nation address to advance Democrats’ top priorities, who would certainly face a struggle in a tightly divided Congress, but he also laid out a four-pronged “one-size-fits-all” agenda that would be easier to sell.
Biden’s unity goals would be unarguable for anyone: improve mental health, support veterans, fight the opioid epidemic, and fight cancer. The President is still pushing for some of those big Democratic goals, like a ban on assault weapons, but he does better on the unity goals.
Susan Rice, the president’s domestic policy adviser, pointed to “very significant progress” on all four aspects, although she noted that problems like meeting demand for mental health services or tackling drug abuse will not be solved overnight.
“We are pleased with the progress made and committed to moving forward and making further progress,” Rice said in an interview.
A look at the state of affairs:
OPIOIDS
IN SPEECH: Biden asked Congress for more funding for prevention, treatment, harm reduction and recovery. He also called for the removal of rules that prevent doctors from prescribing treatments and he wanted to stem the flow of illegal drugs by having the federal government work with state and local law enforcement officials to prosecute drug dealers.
SINCE THEN: Biden sent his first National Drug Control Strategy to Congress that focused on harm reduction or preventing death and disease in drug users while attempting to involve them in care and treatment. The strategy calls for changes to state laws and policies to support the expansion of harm reduction.
It also calls for targeting the financial activities of transnational criminal organizations that manufacture and traffic in illicit drugs in the United States, reducing the supply of illicit drugs smuggled across US borders, improving data systems and research who guide drug policy, and to ensure that people benefit most from it People at risk of drug overdose can receive evidence-based treatments, including people affected by homelessness and people who are incarcerated or incarcerated are.
The Department of Health and Human Services awarded nearly $1.5 billion in grants to all states and U.S. territories to improve access to substance abuse treatment, remove barriers to treatments like naloxone, the opioid-reversing drug -Overdose uses and to expand access to support services and treatment programs.
The Food and Drug Administration approved several naloxone products over the past year, including a higher-dose injection as an additional option to treat opioid overdoses, a second generic naloxone nasal spray, and a naloxone auto-injector product for military use and response chemical incidents.
MENTAL HEALTH
IN SPEECH: Biden emphasized mental health care for children, citing the turmoil in her life and schooling caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. He called for holding social media platforms accountable for their negative impact on children, strengthening privacy protections, banning child-targeted advertising and demanding that tech companies stop collecting personal data from children. And he urged parents to make sure their children’s schools use the $122 billion in pandemic relief funds they received from Washington to hire teachers and help students catch up on lost learning.
Since then: The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the gun violence law that Biden signed into law last June, allocates more than $1 billion over five years to support schools’ mental health, in line with the president’s goal to increase the number of school counselors , social workers and other mental health professionals to double. The Ministry of Education has started releasing these funds.
A new “988” National Suicide and Crisis Hotline opened in July and has received far more calls and texts than the old system did in the same period last year, according to the White House.
Biden released a national mental health strategy. But legislation to address children’s tech privacy issues has not yet been approved by Congress.
“This is an area where we still need to do more,” Rice said.
veterans
IN SPEECH: Biden asked Congress to pass legislation to ensure health care for veterans who became ill from exposure to toxic smoke on bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
SINCE THEN: In August he signed the law a significant expansion of government health care for millions of veterans who inhaled the toxic smoke from huge “fire pits” used to dispose of chemicals, plastics, medical equipment, human waste and other substances at US military installations in the two countries.
More than two-thirds of disability requests related to exposure to the pits were denied by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The new law, known in Washington and among veterans as the PACT Act, directs officials to assume that certain respiratory diseases and cancers are linked to exposure to fire pits. The change helps veterans and their survivors collect disability payments without having to prove their illness was caused by their service. It is estimated that up to 3.5 million veterans could benefit.
The issue is personal to Biden, who has suggested this many times aggressive brain tumor that killed his son Beau may have been caused by his exposure to fire pits in Iraq. Beau Biden was stationed in Iraq for about a year as a major in the Delaware Army National Guard.
Biden held a grand White House signing ceremony for the bill and presented the pen to the young daughter of Sgt. 1st Class Heath Robinson, who died of cancer and for whom the legislation is named.
Separately, Veterans in need of psychiatric care can now press 1 after dialing 988 to connect to the Veterans Crisis Line.
CANCER
IN SPEECH: Biden noted how personal the cancer issue is for him and his wife Jill, as well as for Vice President Kamala Harris, along with millions of people like them who have lost friends and loved ones to various forms of the disease.
Just ahead of last year’s State of the Union address, Biden announced that he would “re-ignite” one Federal initiative to fight cancer That was first launched in 2016 when he was vice president and following the death of his son Beau in 2015. As president, Biden set a new goal for the “Cancer Moonshot” initiative, which would reduce cancer death rates by at least 25 years to cut in half.
He asked Congress to fund the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health in the speech and described it as based on a Department of Defense research agency that led to the creation of the internet, GPS and more. He said the new health research agency’s “sole purpose” is to advance breakthroughs in cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and more.
SINCE THEN: ARPA-H was established in March 2022 at the Department of Health and Human Services.
The $1.7 trillion government funding bill signed by Biden in December included $1.5 billion for the new health agency.
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