Congressional Budget Reports accompany the annual federal budget that Congress develops each year. In these reports, Congress explains how much funding it is allotting to federal agencies and programs and what its priorities are for the use of the funds. Appropriations Committee members create the federal budget and these reports based on a variety of inputs, including constituents’ requests.  

U.S. Pain Foundation—in collaboration with a group of other like-minded organizations—has made two requests this year:

1) For Congress to allocate $2M to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to collect, analyze, and report annually on population health data on chronic pain.

An estimated 50 million American adults have chronic pain, making it a highly prevalent, costly, and disabling health condition. Yet, despite its pervasiveness, who is affected, the extent of resulting disability, the nature and accessibility of effective pain management, and related costs all remain largely unknown to policymakers and the broader public. We simply do not collect, analyze, and report this data on a regular basis, making it easy to ignore this problem. Without this data, how can we design solutions and determine whether any interventions are effective? We must as a nation begin to report this information.

2) For Congress to urge the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to disseminate the Pain Management Best Practices Task Force Report to the nation’s PCP’s and to launch a public awareness campaign about the differences between acute and chronic pain.

In 2016, Congress asked the HHS Secretary to appoint a Task Force of the nation’s foremost experts in pain management to recommend best practices, identify gaps and make recommendations to address these gaps. The Task Force completed its recommendations in 2019 and its report was lauded and endorsed by over 160 healthcare organizations. The report recommends an individualized, multidisciplinary approach to managing acute and chronic pain and identifies a broad range of treatment options. However, the report has never been disseminated to the nation’s PCP’s and pain management policies and educational tools have never been updated across federal agencies.

There is still time for you to ask your federal senators to support these critical requests! If you live in one of these 8 states, one of your senators sits on the Labor HHS Appropriations Subcommittee and knows about our requests: AL, CT, HI, IN, KS, NH, RI, WVA