The ADA Washington Office has worked in coordination with Sens. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) to introduce our flexible savings accounts (FSA) legislation later this week during the Senate’s lame duck session. We asked them to introduce the legislation now with the hope that it gets a scoring by the Joint Tax Committee, which should make it easier to have it reintroduced early during the next congress.

The legislation would allow taxpayers who use flexible spending accounts for their medical expenses to purchase over-the-counter dental products using those funds. Identical bipartisan House companion legislation (H.R. 3109) was introduced last year by Rep. Ron Lewis (R-Ky.) and Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) and has 38 cosponsors.

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Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, will hold a press conference Wednesday laying out the framework for a proposed health care reform package. At this point it is too early to tell what the exact provisions of his proposal will be. According to a letter Sen. Baucus sent to President-Elect Obama last week, his proposal will "detail specific policy areas and proposals on which I believe the Congress must move forward to achieve successful health care reform – from options for strengthening the employer-based system and reforming the delivery of health care for efficiency and quality to existing ideas on comparative effectiveness research and health information technology."

Although the Democrats will likely make it a point at the press conference to stress their unity, some cynical observers on the Hill have told us they believe Sen. Baucus's planned press conference is his way of establishing for himself a central role in the process. ADA staff will attend the event and we'll report on it fully next week.

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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continues to suffer criticism over its safety review of bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical found in many plastic products. After an FDA internal review panel issued a report chastising the agency for "inadequate" measures in assessing BPA's safety, leading environmentalists and scientists picked up the cudgel. The FDA has failed "to protect the American people's public health," said Kenneth Cook, co-founder and president of the Environmental Working Group, quoted in a recent issue of CQ Healthbeat. "Unfortunately over time, the FDA has sided again and again against the public health and with (industries it regulates.)"

Many scientists believe the evidence that BPA is detrimental to animal health is strong enough to warrant more serious investigation into how it affects humans, and perhaps greater regulation.

The ADA earlier this year asked dental sealant companies to inform us if they use BPA in the process of manufacturing their products.

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