Pharma-friendly politicians working to sneak through 21st Century Cures Act

Senate scheming to pass dangerous ‘21st Century Cures Act’

It may be the most dangerous piece of medical legislation to ever hit the halls of Congress.

And it’s rocketing its way toward becoming law.

I’ve been warning you for months about the so-called 21^st Century Cures Act – and how it would keep you and the people you love from ever being protected from dangerous drugs and medical devices.

People like you from all over the country have been demanding that Congress kill this bill. But now it looks like the Senate is cooking up a devious scheme to make sure the 21^st Century Cures Act is signed into law.

All without really having to vote on it at all.

Big Pharma free-for-all

I’m sure we’ve all seen street-corner con artists playing the “shell game.”

They move around the shells so quickly that before long you can’t tell which one the ball is under – of it’s even still there at all.

And, believe it or not, that’s exactly how the Senate is trying to pass the 21^st Century Cures Act right now. They’re trying to force it into law without you ever realizing they did it.

I’ll explain just what they’re up to in a minute.

But first it’s important to remember just how dangerous this bill is – and how it puts millions of patients like us right in harm’s way.

I started telling you about the 21^st Century Cures Act last summer, when the House passed it so quickly you would have thought they were in a rush to go on vacation (they probably were).

It’s 393 pages of giveaways to Big Pharma and the medical device industry that would:

Practically gut what’s left of the FDA approval process, so risky drugs would hit the market faster than ever.
Drop a requirement that drugs show any “clinical benefit” whatsoever before they’re approved and prescribed to millions.
Let medical devices be approved based on little more than biased journal articles. In just the past year we’ve heard about people dying after their medical scopes had superbugs, and about hysterectomy equipment that can spread cancer. And there will be even more of these horror stories if the 21^st Century Cures Act passes.

And trust me – that’s just the short list.

Now, as I said, the 21^st Century Cures Act passed the House with flying colors. But with lots of regular citizens and government watchdog groups sounding the alarm about the bill, it’s run into some problems in the Senate.

So now it looks like a bunch of Big Pharma-friendly politicians are trying to sneak it through any way they can. In fact, they’re plotting two strategies to ram the bill through and make sure it ends up on President Obama’s desk:

Strategy #1: A Senate committee is working on carving the 21^st Century Cures Act into several smaller bills they can pass one at a time. That’ll make it harder to track the legislation – and it guarantees that Big Pharma and the medical device industry won’t walk away empty-handed. Even if they can’t pass all of the 21^st Century Cures Act, they’ll still try to pass a lot of it.

Strategy #2: This may be the most devious scheme yet. There’s talk that Senators will try to just lump the 21^st Century Cures Act into a larger funding bill. This is basically an easy way for the Senate to approve the bill without ever having to vote on it on its own.

It’s almost like these politicians want to pass the legislation, but they’re too embarrassed to stand up and vote for it.

And they should be. The 21^st Century Cures Act is Washington politics at its worst. It’s a giveaway to billion-dollar special interests that leaves the rest of us in the lurch.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, who chairs a powerful committee that oversees the bill, says he wants to get something passed by April. That means we only have a couple weeks to stop the 21^st Century Cures Act once and for all.

Write your senators today and let them know that a vote for any part of this dangerous legislation (no matter how they try to pass it) is something you’ll remember when election time rolls around.

This is a Pandora’s Box of frightening new ways for Big Pharma and medical device companies to wreak even more havoc on us than ever before.

And once opened, there will be no closing it.

Sources:

“Senators split on FDA and medical research funding bill” Thomas M. Burton, March 3, 2016, The Wall Street Journal, wsj.com