Providing for Consideration of H.R. 6, 21st Century Cures Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the rule to consider the 21st Century Cures Act on the floor. On the Energy and Commerce Committee, we worked tirelessly with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle to get this bill to a place that we could all agree upon, a place where we provide new mandatory funding for NIH to do the critical research that is a foundation for cures, a place where we tweak FDA processes and provide FDA with additional resources to do the new things that will help get treatments and cures to patients faster.

As we worked together to find ways to accelerate innovation, patients with rare diseases have been at the forefront of our conversations. It is often more difficult to research and develop cures for rare disease patients due to their small populations. However, finding cures for rare diseases is not just of the utmost importance to the patients with those rare diseases and their families, it is important to all of us. You never know where a cure might come from, and often research and drug development on one disease may turn out to be fruitful for another.

Mr. Speaker, we all need to work together to advance cures and treatments. A provision of this bill would encourage public-private partnerships to foster better utilization of patient registries that generate important information on the natural history of diseases, especially rare diseases for which other types of research can be difficult.

I also applaud the efforts in this bill to advance the President's Precision Medicine Initiative to accelerate discoveries that are tailored to individual patients' needs.

The telehealth language in 21st Century Cures recognizes telehealth is the delivery of safe, effective, quality healthcare services by a healthcare provider using technology as the mode of delivery, and the interoperability provision makes great strides toward ensuring that our health IT systems can communicate amongst each other and with patients.

Mr. Speaker, I don't claim that this bill is perfect. Compromises have been made. I am disappointed that the amount of NIH funding has been recently reduced from $10 billion to $8.7 billion. I am also disappointed that policy riders, such as the Hyde amendment language, have been inserted after we voted this out of committee, and I look forward to voting for the amendment offered by my colleagues Barbara Lee, Jan Schakowsky, and Yvette Clarke to strike the policy riders language. With that, Mr. Speaker, I do, however, support the 21st Century Cures legislation.

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