The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill authored by U.S. Rep. Evan Jenkins, R-W.Va., that directs the U.S. comptroller general to study the barriers to treating neonatal abstinence syndrome, which happens when a baby is exposed to drugs in the womb before birth.
Jenkins' bill that passed Thursday, the Nurturing and Supporting Healthy Babies Act, will be bundled into a larger health bill that could reach the president's desk by the summer.
House Bill 4978 directs the Government Accountability Office to identify any federal obstacles to establishing centers to treat neonatal abstinence syndrome, as well as evaluate the need for treatment and the access to treatment for infants, especially those covered by Medicaid.
According to Jenkins, the bill will join 17 others that will be folded into the larger Comprehensive Addiction Recovery Act, which originated in the Senate as bipartisan legislation and passed nearly unanimously in March; the bill will likely return to the Senate promptly, Jenkins said.
"This is an important week in Congress; it's an important week of bipartisan support for an issue that has tragically impacted not only communities in West Virginia, but cities and states across the country," Jenkins said. "This will instruct the comptroller general of the United States to collect data on the incidences of NAS across the country; you can only manage what you can measure."
Jenkins, the former executive director of the West Virginia State Medical Association, said his experience as a state senator from Cabell and Wayne County drove him to introduce the NAS Healthy Babies Act - specifically, the establishment of Lily's Place, a Huntington center that treats drug-addicted babies. Jenkins said he helped Lily's Place get off the ground five years ago, and he hopes his federal bill will clear the way for more centers operating on the same model.
"It's hard to imagine anyone more victimized than a newborn infant who's having to go through their first days, weeks or months through the ravages of withdrawal," Jenkins said. "I have held a baby who was drug exposed - their bodies shake and tremor, they cry 24/7, they are ultrasensitive to light, to sound, even to touch. It was five years ago that two NICU nurses from Cabell Huntington Hospital approached me, saying 'we are seeing this huge increase in babies who are drug exposed, and we have to come up with models of care and treatment methods that aren't well-known."
Jenkins said he is confident the CARA Act, with its changes made in the House, will pass the Senate with bipartisan support again and reach President Barack Obama for approval by the summer.
"We're in close communication and working with the Senate to end up with a final package," he said. "I do not envision any substantive bumps in the road - the legislation we are passing on the House side, most of these bills are passing unanimously, so this is not a partisan tug-of-war by any means."
Neonatal abstinence syndrome is a growing problem in southern West Virginia - the issue affected 275 infants born in Huntington in 2015, with many more undetected cases, Rebecca Crowder, the executive director of Lily's Place in Huntington, told the Gazette-Mail in January. According to a study by the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, the prevalence of neonatal abstinence syndrome� has increased significantly nationally, with 3.39 cases in every 1,000 U.S. hospital births as of 2009, up from 1.20 per every 1,000 births in 2000.
Reach Lydia Nuzum at lydia.nuzum@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5189 or follow @lydianuzum on Twitter.