Chair Cassidy Delivers Remarks During Hearing on Delivering Lifesaving Cures to Patients, Maintaining American Competitiveness

WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, delivered remarks during today's hearing on how we can better deliver lifesaving cures to patients and maintain American dominance in medical innovation.

Click here to watch the full hearing.

Cassidy's speech as prepared for delivery can be found below:

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will please come to order.

As a medical doctor, I've seen the power of innovation to take diseases that were once fatal or disabling and make them an afterthought.

In medical school, removing a portion of someone's stomach because of peptic ulcer disease was a common surgery. It was performed one or two times a week at the small hospital where I worked. But then along came a drug called Tagamet and within months, the surgery was hardly done at all. That is a drug considered so simple now that it's sold over the counter. Now we have drugs for Alzheimer's, obesity, malignant melanoma, and other conditions that before were untreatable. We have cures for Hepatitis C, spinal implants made with 3D printing, tests to detect diseases faster, and other interventions to significantly improve patient outcomes.

The United States leads the world in lifesaving medical discoveries, accounting for 40 percent of the world's biotech-related patents for drugs. Backed by the FDA's gold standard review, we produce twice as many novel chemical or biological products as European countries.

FDA has also approved over 30 cell and gene therapies, including the first gene therapy for sickle cell disease. This is American ingenuity meeting markets at its finest.

But, we cannot rest on our laurels. We must work to maintain that edge. Regulatory uncertainty and outdated frameworks stifled progress and pushed developers overseas - recently to Communist China. I recently spoke to a group of biotech leaders. They in varying degrees view China as a collaborator, a competitor, and as a threat. When developers are looking outside our country for early-stage clinical work, we need to pick up our game. This is important for the American biomedical industry. It's also important for patients.

We need structural reform to give innovators stability and confidence that they can create in America without hardship. This includes eliminating unnecessary barriers in the FDA drug approval process, while ensuring the gold standard of review is maintained. And it means leveraging AI, machine learning, and new technology platforms, such as mRNA, to accelerate drug discovery and clinical development. We must also recognize the coming to market depends upon CMS streamlining the coding, coverage, and reimbursement process so that new technologies don't die a slow, regulatory death post-FDA approval. This is not of this committee's jurisdiction, but it MUST be considered.

Finally, we must ensure fair competition for American biomedical companies with nations that do not share our values and engage in anti-competitive practices like forced technology transfer and IP theft.

These reforms will advance President Trump's goal of Making America Healthy Again while strengthening our dominance in the 21st century global economy. It is pro-patient, pro-family, pro-America.

I look forward to discussing these ideas and more at today's hearing.

With that, I recognize Senator Sanders.

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