President Biden on Dec. 29 signed a $1.7 trillion omnibus appropriations bill for fiscal year 2023 that gave the 340B drug pricing program a slight funding boost.
The U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration’s Office of Pharmacy Affairs will get $12.2 million this fiscal year, $1 million more than in fiscal 2022, according to a spending table in a congressional explanatory report that went with the bill. The Biden administration sought $17.2 million for OPA.
The catch-all spending bill, which was the last act of the previous Congress, did not include language to prevent the disenrollment of an estimated 18 million people from Medicaid if the COVID-19 public health emergency expires in April, as expected. A COVID-19 relief bill passed early during the pandemic stopped state Medicaid agencies from disenrolling people during the emergency. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute estimated in December that 3.8 million people will become completely uninsured when states go back to their normal ways of determining Medicaid eligibility.
Presidential administrations technically must give Congress their proposed budgets for the coming fiscal year on or before the first Monday in February. Administrations often miss the deadline.
