President Biden’s State of the Union address this week laid out his vision for tackling many health care related issues. Here’s a breakdown of the key areas he highlighted:

  • Behavioral Health and the Opioid Crisis
    • Biden plans to increase access to behavioral health providers and require full parity between behavioral and physical health care. The administration seeks to remove barriers to opioid treatment by expanding treatment options and rescinding the X waiver.
  • Strengthening Nursing Home Oversight
    • The President signaled that CMS will set higher standards for nursing homes and increase inspections of facilities.
  • Medicare Drug Pricing Negotiations  
    • Biden urged Congress to let Medicare negotiate drug prices, and that the price of insulin should be capped at $35 a month. Both of those proposals cleared the House in November as part of the Build Back Better Act, which ended up falling apart in the Senate.
  • Combating Cancer
    • Biden called for Congress to fund his proposed biomedical research agency, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to cut cancer death rates in half over the next 25 years.
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