The bill has a number of vocal supporters on both sides of the political aisle, including Senators Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire and Rob Portman from Ohio, both Republicans. Their home states illustrate the true depths of the country’s struggle with addiction. Both Ohio and New Hampshire rank among the top-five states in age-adjusted mortality rates for drug overdoses, at 24.6 and 26.2 deaths per 100,000 members of the population, respectively. Between 2013 and 2014, New Hampshire’s death toll grew by an astounding 75 percent. Ayotte and Portman are front-line fighters against a wave of opioid deaths, and several senators have rallied behind their banners.

But with that broad support comes an important caveat: Without proper funding, CARA could be toothless, even if it passes the House. Democrats almost stalled the bill’s passage because of Republican resistance to an additional $600 million funding package, which was dropped. Even that beefed-up investment might have been paltry in comparison with the true costs of the opioid epidemic now gripping America, which is responsible for at least $25 billion in health costs alone every year.

As the commander-in-chief of this war, President Obama is pressing forward as well. His 2017 budget calls for $1.1 billion to help fight the opioid epidemic, most of it in arrangements with states to expand access to naloxone. He has also leveraged the executive branch to expand access to medication-based treatment, expand access to mental-health and drug-abuse treatment for Medicaid patients, and expand community policing in addressing heroin distribution.

Even if both ideas are woefully underfunded relative to the magnitude of the crisis, Obama’s budget would ideally complement the Senate’s, matching its focus on prescription-drug control with a more immediate life-saving investment to directly halt drug overdoses, a combination that fights both sides of the continuum that oscillates to create this crisis. But that relationship relies on passage and full appropriation for both the bill and the budget, a prospect that even with extraordinary bipartisan support seems unlikely given recent history.

The greater history of public health offers some hope. After World War II, the country threw itself into a multifront public-health campaign, pouring public, private, and philanthropic resources into vaccine research; establishing agencies like the Centers for Disease Control, which has become the face of American public health; expanding the National Institutes of Health; and generally establishing a strong precedent of public health as the provenance of the federal government. The Public Health Service Act, passed by Truman’s predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944, brought disparate public-health bodies under the aegis of wartime coordination and precision—and doubled their budgetsblend of fundingJonas Salk discovered the superweapon vaccine to fight polio in 1952. The twin policies of Medicare and Medicaid, programs that Truman championed, were signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, partially completing the circle of public health and public insurance.