House passes 21st Century Cures Act, Senate expected to vote on bill next week

Published 9:18 am Friday, December 2, 2016

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On Wednesday, members of the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed what one federal lawmaker is calling the most important bill Congress will pass this year.
The House voted 392 to 26 to pass the bill known as the “21st Century Cures Act,” a $6.3 billion healthcare package which supports say includes new researching funding, streamlines process for bringing medicines and medical technology from the labs to the market, provides mental health reforms and creates state grants to fight opioid abuse.
U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who chairs the Senate Health Committee, helped to write this legislation and has been working on it for two years.
“The House of Representatives passed today what I believe is the single most important piece of legislation that Congress will enact this year,” Alexander said on Wednesday evening following the passage of the bill. The Senate will take up the bill on Monday, and Alexander said he is confident it will pass by a wide margin there as well.
“What it will do is move into medicine cabinets and doctors offices more rapidly and at lower cost medicines to treat Alzheimer’s, to treat cancer, to treat diabetes,” Alexander said. “There’s a billion new dollars to fight the opioid epidemic that’s creating problems in virtually every county in Tennessee.”
U.S. Rep. Phil Roe, M.D., who represents Tennessee’s 1st Congressional District in Congress, told the Elizabethton Star on Thursday he was proud to support the 21st Century Cures Act on the House floor and looks forward to seeing the bill signed into law.
“As a physician, I treated patients for more than thirty years. When I graduated medical school 45 years ago, my first pediatric rotation was at St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis,” Roe said. “During that time, a majority of the children with cancer I treated as a young medical student died because of their disease. Today, almost 90 percent of those children live because of advances we’ve made in scientific research to treat and cure diseases, but we have more work to do.”
Roe said he has seen the need for this type of reform in the laws regarding research and medication development not only in his professional life as a physician, but in his personal life as well.
“I’ve experienced first-hand what a devastating, incurable disease can do to a family,” Roe said. “There are 10,000 known conditions and diseases, and we only have cures and treatments for 500 of them. Chances are, all of us know and love someone who has been diagnosed with an incurable or untreatable illness.
“For those patients and families, 15 years is far too long for a new drug to move from a lab to a patient,” he added. “The 21st Century Cures Act will speed up and streamline that process while giving patients more options for treatment.”
Roe also touted other aspects of the legislation package as being important needs as well.
“I am also pleased this bill addresses some of our most pressing public health issues like opioid abuse and mental health care,” he said. “I truly believe this bill will make a huge difference in the lives of many Tennesseans.”
In addition to receiving support from an overwhelming majority of the House of Representatives, many professionals in the medical, research, and patient care fields wrote letters of support to Congress regarding the 21st Century Cures Act. Among the many agencies and organizations to draft letters of support are: American Cancer Society – Cancer Action Network, American Heart Association, National Health Council, American Stroke Association, Epilepsy Foundation, Association of American Cancer Institutes, and the Association of American Medical Colleges.
In the letter of support from the American Cancer Society – Cancer Action Network, that agency’s President Christopher Hansen provided some statistics on the number of people in the nation impacted by cancer.
“In the United States, one in two men and one in three women will receive a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. This year alone, an estimated 1.7 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer, more than 589,000 people in the U.S. will die from the disease, and it will cost our economy an estimated $216 billion in direct treatment costs and lost productivity,” Hansen said in the letter. “Since President Nixon signed the landmark National Cancer Act into law, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Cancer Institute (NCI) have played a role in virtually every major advance in the fight against cancer. Cancer mortality rates have been in steady decline since the mid-1990s, and there are now more than 14.5 million cancer survivors living in the U.S.”
While those advances in care and treatment have greatly improved survival rates, Hansen said there is more work that needs to aid in developing treatments and researching a cure.
“Over the past decade, funding for cancer research has not kept up with the pace of scientific progress. When accounting for inflation, the NIH budget has shrunk by more than 22 percent since FY 2003,” Hansen said. “At the same time, researchers have begun developing targeted therapies and immunotherapies for some of the deadliest forms of cancer, ushering in a new era of precision medicine.”
“We need to do everything we can to continue this momentum and that means more support for the research that’s happening with NIH support in laboratories in every part of this nation,” he added.
The 21st Century Cures legislation will:
• Help bring safe drugs and devices to market more quickly and at less cost by making needed reforms to the FDA, including: expedited review for breakthrough devices, increased patient involvement in the drug approval process, a streamlined review process for combination products that are both a drug and device, and freedom from red tape for software like fitbits or calorie counting apps.
• Provide $4.8 billion to National Institutes of Health, including: $1.8 billion for Vice President Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot” to speed cancer research; $1.4 billion for President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative to drive research into the genetic, lifestyle and environmental variations of disease; and $1.6 billion for the BRAIN initiative to improve our understanding of diseases like Alzheimer’s and speed diagnosis and treatment.
• Provide $500 million to the Food and Drug Administration.
• Provide $1 billion in grants to states to address the opioid crisis.
• Address the country’s mental health crisis and help the one out of five adult Americans suffering from mental illness receive the care they need.
For more information on the 21st Century Cures Act, visit https://energycommerce.house.gov/cures.

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