Sen. Barbara Mikulski
Budget cuts in the past decade to the National Institutes of Health have
hampered the U.S. response to the disease in Africa, according to the NIH director, who said "if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would've gone through clinical trials and would have been ready." The Centers for Disease Control
has had its emergency preparedness budget cut nearly in half since 2006. A Health and Human Services program to help
hospitals prepare for "bio-disasters" has also been slashed. With that as a backdrop, House Democrats have been pushing for funding hearings, to
little avail.
It's a different story in the Senate, though, where Sen. Barbara Milkulski has scheduled a hearing for November 6, two days after the election.
It would mark the first appropriations hearing on Ebola since Congress recessed in September. A number of other congressional panels have also held hearings examining the administration’s response to the deadly disease in recent weeks.
On Friday, Office of Management and Budget spokeswoman Emily Cain told The Hill, “OMB is working with CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and other agencies to determine whether additional resources will be needed to address the epidemic beyond those provided in the Continuing Resolution.”
This hearing could be the first opportunity to try to determine whether our public health system is adequately prepared to deal with a potential infectious disease outbreak like Ebola, but it's also a great opportunity to talk about the diseases we are already dealing with—the flu, the enterovirus that's infecting children, paralyzing some—and whether the funding is in place to support healthcare providers across the country to respond.
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It could also be the administration's opportunity to begin making a case for more funding, if necessary. But don't expect that to be a simple request. There's already
talk from the Republican House of forcing counter-productive travel bans to be included in the continuing resolution that has to pass before the end of the year to keep the government functioning.