Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Relating to ``Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards; Fuel System Integrity of Hydrogen Vehicles; Compressed Hydrogen Storage System Integrity; Incorporation By Reference''

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASSIDY. I appreciate the ranking member's interest in addressing drug prices, and you absolutely have to lower the cost of prescription drugs. And we absolutely have to acknowledge that there is a tension. If we do not incentivize the development of new types of drugs, we condemn ourselves to continue to die from diseases for which there are currently no cures.

And I say this as a guy who has practiced medicine--or graduated from med school in 1983. Let me put it that way.

When I graduated from medical school, one of the most common surgeries was taking out a portion of somebody's stomach. I don't mean your belly. I mean your stomach, where the food goes down after you swallow it. This is how I talk to medical students--because of peptic ulcer disease.

And there came along a medicine called cimetidine. It just changed the landscape. And we went from a surgery being most common to one which was rarely performed in 6 months. Cimetidine, which is now called Tagamet, which is now sold over the counter--just a measure of innovation, which if we had not had that innovation then, a most common surgery would still be removing a portion of somebody's stomach because of bleeding ulcers.

More tragically--it is pretty tragic when you lose part of your stomach--when I was a resident in Los Angeles is when the HIV epidemic came out. And all of these men--they were all men--20 to 30, came in with something that we didn't even know what the disease was. We didn't have a way to diagnose it. So we called it the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. And they all died. They all died.

And I remember saying to one of the older physicians: Why do we even bother treating them, because they all die?

But because there was an incentive for companies to come up with cures, they did it. And they stopped dying, and they began living.

That doesn't happen accidentally. It happens because there is incentive to bring a drug through expensive studies to the market. By the way, I recently had a doc tell me, who treats HIV positives, that if a patient takes their medicine, they die when they are 88 of Alzheimer's or a stroke or something else, but they should not die from an AIDS-related cancer. That is the power of innovation, and that is the power of incentivizing innovation.

I could go down a list of other drugs. Melanoma. When I was in med school, if you got diagnosed with melanoma, they said go fill out the will. Now I have friends who have been living for 8 years, 10 years longer taking immunotherapy for melanoma. That doesn't just happen. That happens because you incentivize innovation.

So what are our diseases now for which we have no cure? Alzheimer's. I lost two parents to it. Wouldn't it be great if we had a cure for Alzheimer's?

Pancreatic cancer, esophageal cancer--I could just go down the list of things for which there is no cure. But, I can tell you, with the appropriate incentive, with the research taking place, in 10 years, we will speak of those diseases as diseases of the past, as we now speak of bleeding peptic ulcer disease causing a portion of your stomach to be resected as something in the distant past.

Now, by the way, I applaud my colleague. I applaud President Trump for saying that other countries are not carrying their fair share of the load for paying for this innovation. They should do it too. This is not the way to get there. But it is absolutely essential that they do. And my staff is bringing something, which I will invite my colleague from Vermont to join us on that, because it is absolutely essential that we have the innovation, that we be able to afford it. And the only way we balance those two is if other countries pay their fair share.

But let's return to the measure at hand. The measure at hand sounds simple. It is simple. It won't succeed. Well, it will succeed in lowering prices temporarily, but, in the long term, it will defeat the ability to incentivize innovation. And then all drugs will be cheap because all drugs will be old. But we need new drugs, and we need the incentive, and this kills that incentive.

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