SCREENS Act Secures $235M Annually for Cancer Screening Through 2030, Explicitly Targets Health Disparities

The official name for this legislation is the Screening for Communities to Receive Early and Equitable Needed Services for Cancer Act of 2025, or the SCREENS for Cancer Act for short. This bill is essentially a major update and reauthorization of the decades-old National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program (NBCCEDP), which provides critical, often life-saving, screenings and diagnostic services to uninsured and underinsured women.

The Money and the Mandate: What’s Changing

If you’re a woman without health insurance, or if your coverage is thin, the NBCCEDP is probably the safety net that covers your mammograms and Pap tests. This bill doesn't just keep the lights on; it turns them up. It removes previous funding caps and authorizes $235,000,000 for the program for each fiscal year from 2026 through 2030. That’s five years of secured funding to ensure these services continue.

Crucially, the bill broadens the program’s official goals. Where it once focused on detection and control, it now explicitly includes prevention—meaning the program is expected to work upstream, not just catch issues after they start. It also tightens up the mandate around follow-up care, stating that appropriate follow-up services must be provided, not just offered as a possibility. This is a big deal because a screening is useless if the patient can’t afford the next step (like a biopsy or treatment).

Tackling the Real-World Access Problem

One of the most significant changes is the explicit focus on health equity. The bill mandates that the program must actively work to reduce disparities in cancer rates and deaths. This means the program can’t just offer screenings; it has to figure out why certain populations—say, women in rural areas, or specific ethnic groups—have worse outcomes and higher mortality rates. They are now required to tackle barriers related to negative health outcomes and improve fair access to screening and diagnostic services.

Think about a single parent working two jobs who can’t take time off for an appointment. The bill requires the program to enhance support activities like patient navigation and making it easier for people to get to the screening locations. For the program administrators, this means moving beyond just setting up a clinic and actively addressing issues like transportation, childcare, and time off—the stuff that keeps regular people from getting preventative care.

Oversight and Accountability Tweaks

The bill also adjusts how the program is evaluated. Currently, the Secretary reports on the program annually. The SCREENS Act changes this to a biennial report (every two years). While this reduces the frequency of formal federal oversight reporting, the reports themselves will cover a longer look-back period (five fiscal years instead of two), theoretically allowing for better long-term trend analysis. The reporting shift is a trade-off: less frequent updates, but potentially deeper dives into the data.

To ensure the program is actually working, the bill mandates a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study to be completed by September 30, 2027. This study must figure out exactly how many people are eligible for the program, summarize trends in who is actually using it, and—most importantly—identify all the roadblocks people face when trying to access these services. This is the government’s way of saying, “We want to know if the money is actually reaching the people who need it most, and if not, why.”