The House Ways and Means Committee voted 40 to 0 on September 16 to advance H.R. 6130, the Alzheimer’s Screening and Prevention Act, sending the bill toward the House floor with the unanimous backing of a committee that split sharply on several other bills the same day. The legislation would direct Medicare to build a coverage pathway for FDA-approved blood-based biomarker tests that can flag Alzheimer’s disease years before symptoms appear. Roughly 7.2 million Americans currently live with the disease, and the bill’s sponsors say Medicare’s existing rules leave newly cleared blood tests waiting years for coverage even after federal approval. A unanimous committee vote is notable, but it remains a markup outcome, not a law.
Forty Votes, Zero Objections, at Ways and Means
The vote came during a full committee markup held in the Capitol’s House Visitor Center, where Ways and Means worked through seven separate bills in a single session, ranging from digital-asset tax rules to a measure targeting cobalt mined with forced labor. H.R. 6130 was one of only two items in that batch that cleared on a unanimous roll call; several of the other bills split closely along party lines, with Democratic amendments voted down by margins as tight as 20 to 18. That contrast made the Alzheimer’s bill’s unanimous outcome stand out even on a busy markup day.
Before the final vote, the committee adopted an amendment in the nature of a substitute offered by Chairman Jason Smith of Missouri, and a separate amendment filed by Rep. Don Beyer was withdrawn without ever coming to a vote. The bill was then ordered favorably reported to the House of Representatives as amended, by a roll call vote of 40 yeas and zero nays, according to the committee’s own markup record.
Florida Republican Vern Buchanan, the committee’s vice chairman and chairman of its Health Subcommittee, has led the bill together with New York Democrat Paul Tonko, and said his own experience caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s shaped why he pushed the measure toward a vote this Congress. Chairman Smith backed the substitute amendment that carried the bill forward, framing blood-based screening as a tool that could catch the disease before Medicare’s current rules allow coverage to begin.
Where the help is written down: The programs that lower Medicare costs each run on a different form and a different office, and no single notice lists them together. See the state cost-help packs in The Medicare Cost & Coverage Protection Kit.
How Medicare’s Coverage Rules Currently Block Blood-Based Testing
Under current law, Medicare can pay for a preventive service only when Congress has specifically authorized it or when the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has issued a recommendation, a structure that can leave a newly FDA-cleared test waiting years before Medicare beneficiaries can use it. Buchanan’s office says H.R. 6130 would authorize the Secretary of Health and Human Services to build a transitional coverage pathway for FDA-approved or FDA-cleared blood-based biomarker tests, letting Medicare pay for early Alzheimer’s detection while the standard coverage-determination process runs its course. The bill has drawn 215 bipartisan cosponsors in the House as of the day of the vote.
Smith, the committee’s chairman, argued the current gap matters because blood tests can now flag biological markers of Alzheimer’s before a patient shows symptoms, a capability that did not exist when Medicare’s preventive-service rules were written. He said outdated coverage rules currently stand between seniors and diagnostic tools already cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, leaving families without the years of advance planning time a blood-based diagnosis could otherwise provide.
Tonko, the bill’s Democratic co-lead, has described the measure as a way to keep Medicare’s coverage rules paced with the underlying science, arguing that a blood test cleared by the FDA should not sit outside Medicare’s reach for years while the agency’s standard national coverage determination process works through a new technology. Both lawmakers frame the bill as narrowly technical: it does not create a new entitlement or mandate a specific test, it only gives HHS the statutory authority to move faster once a test clears FDA review.
The underlying legislation, formally titled the Alzheimer’s Screening and Prevention Act of 2025, was introduced in the House before picking up a Senate companion, sponsored by Maine Republican Susan Collins and Nevada Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, which has attracted 50 cosponsors of its own. Neither chamber’s version has reached a floor vote, and the Senate bill has not yet had its own committee markup.
The Steps Left Between a Markup and a Law
A favorable committee vote sends a bill toward the House floor, but it does not schedule a vote there, and House leadership has not yet set a date for H.R. 6130. The full House has not considered the measure, no companion vote has occurred in the Senate, and the bill carries no effective date because it has not been enacted; Medicare beneficiaries cannot yet use it to get a blood-based Alzheimer’s test covered.
That distinction matters for anyone tracking the bill because of how quickly committee action gets described elsewhere as if it were final. The Ways and Means markup record itself lists the outcome plainly: H.R. 6130 was ordered favorably reported to the House of Representatives as amended, language that means the bill is now eligible for consideration by the full House, not that it has already passed one.
The path forward requires House leadership to schedule floor time, likely bundled with other bills that cleared the same markup, before the Senate would also need to pass its own version or reconcile it with the House’s text. Given the current legislative calendar and competing priorities in the House, no timeline for a floor vote has been announced, and Medicare beneficiaries should not expect any change to Alzheimer’s screening coverage in the near term absent further action from Congress.
For now, the record most directly tied to the bill’s status remains the committee’s own account of the September 16 markup, which shows H.R. 6130 cleared as amended by a unanimous 40-0 vote and moved toward the House calendar, with the Alzheimer’s Association and the Alzheimer’s Impact Movement both on record backing the measure as it awaits a floor vote.
Screening Coverage Between Bill and Benefit
Even if H.R. 6130 eventually becomes law, a new screening pathway would not resolve the coverage questions Medicare beneficiaries already face once a diagnosis is in hand, including how Part D drug spending is capped for the year and what steps a beneficiary can take when a plan denies a treatment before it ever reaches a pharmacy counter. Those rules sit alongside the screening debate playing out in committee, and they already apply to beneficiaries managing Alzheimer’s-related care today.
The Medicare Cost & Coverage Protection Kit is a 10-page kit that lays out the new Part D out-of-pocket cap and the prior-authorization appeal steps a beneficiary can use after a claim gets denied.
See the prior-authorization appeal steps in The Medicare Cost & Coverage Protection Kit.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Money Overview editorial team.
