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Good morning. There’s a lot of great reporting to share today, so be sure to read all the way through the newsletter. We won’t have a newsletter tomorrow, Juneteenth, so I’ll talk to you again on Monday.
New announcement, old funds
The Trump administration announced yesterday it will spend $700 million in what Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called new investments for mental health and addiction programs. But behavioral health experts told STAT’s Lev Facher that the funds are actually long-awaited, existing grants that Congress had previously authorized and the federal government already planned to spend.
“We have a huge drug problem here in our country,” Kennedy said. “$700 million is not going to solve that problem. But the good news is, there’s about $50 billion that have been put aside during the litigation by the states against the opioid companies, and that money is now going to be available to the states over the next 20 years.” Read more from Lev.
