U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-MI-08, said pain care legislation approved in the House last night addresses the need to improve the care for chronic pain endured by more than 50 million Americans. Rogers and Rep. Lois Capps, D-CA-23, introduced the National Pain Care Policy Act of 2007 authorizing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to take several pain care-related steps, including strengthening pain research.

“Chronic pain is the most common reason Americans seek medical care,” said Rogers, who first introduced pain care legislation in 2003. Part of his original pain care proposal was included in the NIH Reform Act of 2006. “More than 50 million Americans are partially or totally disabled by pain,” Rogers said. “Pain patients suffering a wide range of medical conditions, including cancer, diabetes and arthritis, struggle through a maze of uncertainty, seeing countless specialists before finding effective treatment. “Pain prevents sufferers from working and caring for themselves and their families, and it reduces productivity, costing job providers more than $78 billion a year. Unfortunately, the NIH spends less than 1 percent of its research budget studying pain. Much more needs to be done to address the needs of chronic pain patients and their families. We need to improve education, access and research to address this growing problem for so many Americans.”

Rogers and Capps, a registered nurse, introduced the measure adopted today, which includes:

• Convening an Institute of Medicine (IOM) Conference on pain to identify barriers to pain care, improve education and access for patients.

• Strengthening pain research at NIH and creating an inter-agency coordinating committee to improve collaboration between the Department of Health and Human Services, the Veterans Administration, and the Department of Defense.

• Improving education and training for providers with a new grant program to assist health care professionals in understanding the causes and potential treatments of pain, working across all medical disciplines to improve the quality of pain care.

• Creating a public awareness campaign, an outreach effort to educate consumers, patients, and their families on all aspects of pain care. A companion bill to the National Pain Care Policy Act of 2007 has been introduced in the Senate.