Trickett Wendler, Frank Mongiello, Jordan McLinn, and Matthew Bellina Right to Try Act of 2018

Floor Speech

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Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding. I also pay my respects and give honor to Ron Johnson, the Senator from Wisconsin who championed the bill in the Senate and gave us a superb bill; also, Chairman Walden and his committee, who have worked hard to give us this bill today; and my original cosponsor on the bill that I introduced, Mr. Fitzpatrick from Pennsylvania.

Mr. Speaker, I want to address just a couple of things that I think are really intriguing to me because it certainly seems a bit condescending to me when I hear people say: I am not going to support this because it gives false hope that people might be taken advantage of by bad actors. They cannot identify the bad actors, but they might be taking advantage of them. That is a fallacious and specious argument to make when you are denying people who have a terminal illness, who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness, who have gone through the already approved FDA processes in order to get and petition a pharmaceutical company for an experimental drug that might prolong their life and might heal them.

False hope, that argument, is the argument that I am hearing. But the reality is these people are individuals. They have a higher sense of reality than virtually anybody else I know because their mortality is there. They want the opportunity. It is not false hope. It is hope. Support of this bill is compassionate. Support of this bill is fair.

I have also heard that there may be some liability issues on the part of pharmaceutical companies which might impede them from providing drugs. Yet, in order to satisfy them, the bill itself says that they are exculpated unless their conduct is willful or criminal. That means that they have protection.

What I am asking here today, and what everyone with whom I have met over the years who want a right to try is asking, is simply a chance to have some determination and control over their own lives.

One of the intriguing arguments I hear today and I heard last week is, well, you know what, the pharmaceutical companies aren't compelled to provide these drugs. So my immediate question is: Oh, so you would be more comfortable, then, if we would have included a compulsory means in the bill? Did you want the pharmaceutical companies to be compelled to provide these?

The answer would be no. It is simply they don't like this bill. They don't want the bill.

When you have 38, soon to be 39, States that want to give their citizens, Americans all, the right to try to preserve their lives and to be healed and have a chance, they need to get that; they need that opportunity. We need to give it to them today.

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