Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said she is hopeful that Congress will come through with the money to help launch the new program. "We intend to implement the law," she said at a press conference April 10.
The budget also includes funding for mental health. The proposal invests $130 million to add 5,000 mental health professionals to the behavioral health workforce. The money will also fund Project AWARE (Advancing Wellness and Resilience in Education), which trains teachers to detect and respond to mental illness in their students.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would get an additional $30 million to track gun violence and research ways to prevent it under the budget proposal sent to Congress.
The American Psychiatric Association supported the administration’s effort to identify at-risk individuals early through Project AWARE. But the APA said in a statement that it was concerned that the effort to expand the supply of mental health professionals seems to stop at nonphysician providers.
"We recognize the growing need for mental health providers; however, providing a small amount of training to lesser-qualified health professionals at the expense of utilizing veteran medical psychiatrists will only serve to exacerbate the problem we are trying to solve," the APA wrote. "As a nation, we should ensure that patients have access to the full range of services, from physician care to hospital care to outpatient clinics and long-term follow-up."
The National Institutes of Health would receive a $471 million funding increase over its fiscal year 2012 funding, bringing its total budget to $31.1 billion. That includes about $40 billion toward an effort to map the human brain. The agency will also invest $80 million to speed up drug development and the testing of new therapies for Alzheimer’s disease.