Mitch Perry
With virtually no debate, the Florida House Insurance and Banking Committee passed the so-called Right to Try Act on Wednesday. The legislation would allow terminally ill patients to access experimental drugs.
Similiar legislation has spread like wildfire across the country. Ten states in the nation recently have approved such laws, and another 29 (including Florida) are discussing it in their respective state legislatures this year.
Sarasota Republican Rep. Ray Pilon told committee members that a patient must have a series of permissions and forms signed by a doctor before the manufacturer could provide such drugs. The legislation does not mandate that a health care provider must pay for the medications. It also protects physicians from revocations, suspensions or denial of renewal based solely on the doctor’s recommendation of the drugs.
Pilon said that rather than have people travel to Mexico or “go to some dark corner and buy snake oil, which may work for them,” the state has the obligation to allow residents to get drugs that could keep them alive longer.
Drugs and medical devices undergo three phases of clinical trials before they go to the federal Food and Drug Administration for review and, if approved, hit the market. The process can take more than a decade and costs pharmaceutical companies $1.2 billion per drug. Right-to-Try laws cut out that process.
Critics, though, say it undermines the FDA’s approval process, and patients could be putting themselves in harm’s way.
Pilon’s bill, HB 269, allows patients to request drugs that have passed the first clinical trial stage — the one when scientists determine whether a drug hurts people, not whether it can cure them.
It passed the House Insurance and Banking Committee without opposition. St. Petersburg Sen. Jeff Brandes is sponsoring its companion, SB 1052, in the Senate.
Tuesday in Indiana, Gov. Mike Pence signed a bill into law making the Hoosier State just the latest jurisdiction to legalize a right-to-try law.
