WASHINGTON, DC - The bill Democrats have on the floor today, H.R. 987, combines bipartisan bills to lower drug costs with partisan bills to bail out Obamacare.
Rather than use the $4 billion in savings from the drug pricing bills to pay for partisan policies that have no chance of being law, Energy and Commerce Committee Republican Leader Greg Walden (R-OR) offered a motion to recommit to use the savings from these bipartisan drug pricing provisions for childhood cancer research.
As Prepared for Delivery
Mister/Madam Speaker - I have a motion to recommit.
Up until this week, Republicans and Democrats had been working together on provisions to bring generic drugs to market faster.
We believe this bipartisan work will increase competition and ultimately help lower the cost of prescription drugs.
These policies unanimously passed the Energy and Commerce Committee have the added benefit of saving the Federal government more than $4 billion dollars.
Unfortunately, Democrats are using these bipartisan bills to pay for partisan policies that have no chance of moving in the Senate.
This is wrong and demonstrates that the Democrats are not serious about lowering the cost of drugs.
We should be working together on this, not descending “into partisan politics on a seemingly bipartisan issue" as STAT News has reported today.
The fact is, when we work together, we can achieve real results. In the last Congress, we reauthorized the Food and Drug Administration, and gave the agency new tools and resources to get generic drugs into the market faster. This is already working - last year FDA approved a record number of generic drugs, driving competition and giving consumers more choices.
And we worked together to pass the 21st Century Cures Act, landmark legislation that modernized the nation’s biomedical innovation infrastructure, providing billions of dollars to the National Institutes of Health through the NIH Innovation Fund.
This final amendment to the bill is simple.
First, it includes the same bipartisan drug pricing provisions as the underlying bill with bipartisan technical corrections.
But instead of using the bill’s savings to fund partisan health care provisions, this amendment makes clear that the savings from the drug pricing provisions are going to the NIH Innovation Fund to support childhood cancer research.
By using the savings from the drug pricing provisions to pay for childhood cancer research, this amendment makes clear that bipartisan drug pricing offsets should be used to pay for bipartisan health priorities.
If you support lowering the cost of prescription drugs and you support the work of the NIH in its efforts to save the countless lives of children with cancer, vote yes.
