http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/21st-century-cures-act-explained/431491/

On Wednesday, the Senate voted 94-5 to pass the long-awaited 21st Century Cures Bill. As it has backing from the current White House administration, President Barack Obama is expected to sign the legislation into law.

The law has been called the “most important bill of the year” by Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), as Politico Pulse reported Tuesday. The bill, while bipartisan, is not without controversy. While the House version of the legislation passed swimmingly with a vote of 392-26, the bill did have its share of opponents in the Senate– including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) – who think the bill is too favorable to pharmaceutical companies. Both Sanders and Warren were among the five Senators to vote against the measure.

And as Modern Healthcare’s Merrill Goozner notes in an editorial, it’s likely the true impact of the bill won’t be known right away but will be realized as the years pass. “The final details of the 996-page legislation…weren’t known until five days before it passed,” Goozner wrote.

About three years of work and efforts from 1,400 lobbyists for 400 companies went into the making of this $6.3 billion package. It seeks to deliberately speed medical research and treatments. Because seemingly no healthcare legislation can be a reasonable length (it’s about 90 pages longer than the ACA) and because nothing in healthcare is simple, we’ve summarized some of the notable implications of the bill in four buckets: Health IT, mental health, FDA reform and research and care funding.