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A federal agency charged with helping prevent hospital patients from acquiring infections and suffering other harm in the course of medical treatments is emerging as a flash point as appropriators draft the spending bill for many federal health agencies. Lucille Royball-Allard of California on Wednesday cited the reported successes of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) in her bid to protect it. The House fiscal 2016 Labor-HHS would terminate AHRQ, with an intention of spreading its duties among other organizations in the Department of Health and Human Services. (Young, 6/17)

A National Institutes of Health program that channels research money into mostly rural states would get a 14 percent increase in its budget under a House spending plan, a notably generous bump at a time of tight spending caps. Spending for the NIH’s Institutional Development Awards program would rise by almost $39 million to $311.8 million under a draft House Appropriations bill. Finding money for such an increase meant taking funds from other programs. The House Labor-Health and Human Services-Education bill would cut about $3.7 billion overall from fiscal 2015 spending levels. (Young, 6/17)