Roy Blunt: “today I come to you after we have been able to pass out of the Appropriations Committee the bill to fund the Department…”

“today I come to you after we have been able to pass out of the Appropriations Committee the bill to fund the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Education. I want to talk particularly about what happened in that funding, which is now out of committee and ready for the full Senate to act on it and then the Congress to act on it, as it relates to healthcare research. We were able in our committee to have a bipartisan bill. I had a chance to begin to chair that committee 3 years ago. Senator Murray from Washington State is the leading Democrat on that committee. For the previous 6 years--the previous 5 years plus that first budget for which I was the chair--we weren't able to have a bipartisan bill. But the last 2 years, we have decided that we could figure out how to come together with this committee that actually appropriates about 30 percent of all the appropriated dollars that the Congress deals with and find a way to move forward in a bipartisan way. Certainly, Senator Murray is an important part of that partnership, and we were able to take our bill to the committee today. Maybe the thing that we did that will have the most long-term significance in that bill was that, for the third year in a row, we were able to increase healthcare research at the National Institutes of Health. Now, for the 12 years that ended 3 years ago, there had been zero increase in healthcare research in this country.…”