{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["http://degette.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/congress-nears-a-breakthrough-on-medical-research-funding", "Congress Nears a Breakthrough on Medical Research Funding", "2016-12-02", "2016", "2016-12", "Democrat", "House", "CO", "Diana DeGette", "D000197", "degette.house.gov", null, null, "legacy", "In the coming days, the Republican-controlled Congress is likely to approve legislation that will invest more than $6 billion in public health and medical research over the next decade. It will expedite basic research into new medical devices and disease-curing drugs. It will reform mental health treatment and fund research into brain injuries and Alzheimer\u2019s. The bill authorizes $1 billion to combat the opioid epidemic and $1.8 billion for Vice President Joe Biden\u2019s\u00a0\u201cmoonshot\u201d project to cure cancer.\nThose highlights are cited with equal enthusiasm by the coalition of Republicans and Democrats who wrote the\u00a021st Century Cures Act\u00a0and by administration officials hoping it will be perhaps the final significant piece of legislation that President Obama signs.\nBut to Senator Elizabeth Warren, the bill is an enormous giveaway to pharmaceutical companies, a danger to the public, and a legislative license for corporate \u201cfraud,\u201d \u201cbribery,\u201d and \u201cextortion.\u201d\n\u201cI know the difference between compromise and extortion,\u201d the Massachusetts Democrat\u00a0declared in a fiery speech on the Senate floor Tuesday. \u201cCompromise is putting together common-sense health proposals supported by Democrats, by Republicans, and by most of the American people, and passing them into law. Extortion is holding those exact same proposals hostage unless everyone agrees to special favors for campaign donors and giveaways to the richest drug companies in the world.\u201d\nWarren delivered her broadside in a last-minute bid to stop legislation that had been barreling toward passage in the waning days of the 114th Congress. The House initially approved the bill last year, and after negotiations produced a compromise with the Senate, the lower chamber overwhelmingly passed a new version late Wednesday afternoon, 392-26. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed to send the measure to Obama before Congress recesses next week\u2014if Warren and her allies don\u2019t block it first. A day after her floor speech, Warren sent an urgent fundraising plea headlined \u201cHijacked\u201d to her sizable donor base. Senator Bernie Sanders quickly joined her effort, issuing a statement of opposition to the bill on the same grounds.\nIn many respects, the Cures Act represents precisely the kind of diligent, bipartisan legislating to which members of both parties have longed to return. Aimed at a clear public need\u2014improving medical research\u2014it is the product of three years of work by Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Representative Diana DeGette of Colorado, a liberal Democrat on the committee.\nWith the encouragement of the research community and the pharmaceutical industry, both sought legislation that would make it easier to find life-saving cures by cutting barriers that hold up clinical trials and the approval of new drugs and devices those studies can lead to. Republicans prioritized an overhaul of regulations that, they argued, stifled biomedical innovation, while Democrats wanted both a boost in funding and structural reforms for basic research at the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.\n\u201cThose changes will last for decades after the money is spent,\u201d DeGette said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s really not just bringing devices and drugs to market more quickly, but it\u2019s also being able to expedite the basic research behind the way we\u2019re developing these devices.\u201d\nThe bill\u00a0passed by a wide margin\u00a0in July 2015, drawing even more support from Democrats than Republicans. Just seven Democrats voted against it, while 70 Republicans\u2014mostly conservatives\u2014were opposed. In negotiations with the Senate, the legislation arguably became even more favorable to Democrats. A few provisions sought by drug companies were cut out, including one that would extend the period of exclusivity for new medications by six months and delay the introduction of cheaper generics. Biden won money for his cancer moonshot, and a coalition of lawmakers secured funding to send as grants to states fighting opioid addiction. Republicans won the inclusion of long-sought reforms written by Representative Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania to expand mental health services and prioritize treatment of serious illnesses.\nThe White House gave the final compromise its strong support, saying the legislation \u201coffers advances in health that far outweigh\u201d its concerns about the funding of the bill, which came partly from selling off oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.\nYet the changes were not enough to satisfy either the far right or consumer advocacy organizations like Public Citizen, which said the bill still went too far in relaxing approval standards for drugs and devices. The conservative group Heritage Action noted that the legislation had ballooned from 300 pages last year into \u201can almost 1,000-page omnibus health care spending bill.\u201d Although its specific objections focused on spending, its core critique was nearly the same as Warren\u2019s: \u201cIn Washington terms, back-room negotiators have turned the Cures bill into a Christmas Tree, loaded with handouts for special interests, all at the expense of the taxpayer,\u201d Heritage wrote.\nOn the left, Public Citizen argued that even before the bill\u2019s relaxed regulations, Congress had already made it too easy to get drugs and particularly new medical devices to market without sufficient study. \u201cWe\u2019ve already reached a point, we believe, where we\u2019ve gone too far,\u201d said Michael Carome, director of the organization\u2019s health research group. \u201cThe existing regulations already provide a pathway for quick review for bringing drugs to market. And any further weakening would undermine where we are.\u201d\nIn particular, Carome cited a provision in the Cures Act that would allow a company to win approval for a second use of an FDA-approved drug without conducting a randomized clinical trial and instead using what\u2019s known as \u201creal world evidence.\u201d\nHe explained: \u201cSuppose a drug is approved for rheumatoid arthritis and you have to do the randomized clinical trials to prove it was safe and effective, and now you want to have marketed for multiple sclerosis, you can rely upon real world evidence, which is a much lower standard of evidence. It\u2019s more subject to bias and manipulation and can be very misleading. If you\u2019re a patient, such a double standard should be very disconcerting.\u201d\nWarren seized on that same provision, arguing that it amounted to \u201clegalized fraud.\u201d\n\u201cPushing treatments without scientific evidence that they work is fraud\u2014fraud that can hurt people,\u201d she said in her floor speech. \u201cIt also undercuts the development of real cures.\u201d\nIn an unusual alliance with Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, Warren also criticized a provision that would exempted companies from having to disclose certain payments to hospitals and doctors encouraging them to prescribe their drugs. With opposition mounting, the legislation\u2019s sponsors removed that language at the last minute, but Warren said its removal was not enough to win her support.\nHer attack on the bill this week blindsided supporters like DeGette, who insisted the measure\u2019s benefits clearly outweighed its flaws and said Warren either misunderstood or was misrepresenting the Cures Act. \u201cThere\u2019s absolutely no weakening of any kinds of review,\u201d DeGette told me. \u201cWe have the gold standard for safety and efficacy in the world, and we preserve those.\u201d\nShe noted that the bill had strong support from many in the research community and at the NIH, and she pointed out that many provisions sought by Big Pharma that had been included in earlier versions were now gone. \u201cTo categorize this bill as a giveaway to Big Pharma is just simply not accurate,\u201d DeGette said.Democrats are anxious to pass the bill while Obama is in office for many reasons, none more so than the fact that they will surely lose leverage with Donald Trump in the White House. The cancer money is obviously a priority for Biden, and lawmakers in both parties say the funding for the opioid epidemic is already long overdue.\nThere is urgency for Republicans, too. The legislation is a legacy project for Upton, who will remain in Congress but because of GOP term limits is ending his tenure as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. And once Trump takes office, this bill likely would fall further down on an agenda packed with bigger-ticket items like tax reform and repeal of Obamacare. \u201cNot only will it get worse for Democrats next year, I think it\u2019ll be very difficult to find that sweet spot where we agree on legislation in a bipartisan way,\u201d DeGette said.\nWarren, however, seems unconcerned with the question of timing or leverage. To the dismay of fellow liberals like DeGette, she has chosen to make the 21stCentury Cures Act the first Democratic policy fight of the Trump era.\n\u201cThe American people didn't give Democrats majority support so we could come back to Washington and play dead,\u201d she said. \u201cThey didn't send us here to whimper, whine, or grovel. They sent us here to say no to efforts to sell Congress to the highest bidder. They sent us here to stand up for what's right. Now, they are watching, waiting, and hoping\u2014hoping we show some spine and start fighting back when Congress completely ignores the message of the American people and returns to all its same old ways.\n\u201cRepublicans will control this government,\u201d Warren continued, \u201cbut they cannot hand over that control to big corporations unless Democrats roll over and allow them to do so.\u201d\nIt\u2019s a debate Democrats know they need to have\u2014whether and when to work with Trump and the Republicans, or whether simply to fight him at every turn. But the president-elect is still weeks away from becoming president. And to the many lawmakers\u2014172 of them in the House on Wednesday\u2014who share concerns about corporate influence but who believe the Cures Act is a fair compromise that will on balance improve public health, Warren chose the wrong bill, and the wrong moment, to make her stand.\nTwo days after the Massachusetts senator called the Cures Act an example of legalized fraud and extortion, all but six House Democrats voted for it anyway.", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["http://degette.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/congress-nears-a-breakthrough-on-medical-research-funding"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.8929898031055927, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}