Americans for Prosperity is launching a six-figure national ad campaign calling on Congress to pass a bill that would allow terminally ill patients to try experimental medications.
The ads will run on TV and online and show members of both parties discussing the importance of passing the bill. It urges viewers to call members of Congress to voice their support for passage.
“Terminally ill patients are running out of time,” the ad says. “Access to experimental treatments could save their lives. Democrats and Republicans agree. Right to try is the answer.”
The digital campaign will target House and Senate leadership, as well as Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Americans for Prosperity, part of a conservative political advocacy organization funded by the Koch brothers, has said in editorials that it is frustrated with the lack of accomplishments from the Republican-controlled Congress, citing the failure to pass right-to-try legislation as an example of gridlock.
“Right-to-try legislation could make all the difference for the tens of thousands of terminally-ill patients who are running out of options to save their own lives,” Brent Gardner, chief government affairs officer for Americans for Prosperity, said in a statement. “These patients and their families are counting on Congress to end the inaction, get to work, and extend to them the hope they so desperately need and deserve. They don’t have time for political games; Congress needs to act now.”
The bill would let patients gain access to a drug that has gone through the first of three phases of clinical trials. The patient must be terminally ill and have no other options to qualify to receive drugs, but pharmaceutical companies are not obligated to provide them.
Drugmakers are sometimes hesitant to provide a drug outside of a clinical trial to a terminally ill patient because if the patient dies, then it could affect the approval of the product by the Food and Drug Administration. Experts have said that patients who would use right-to-try would likely be sicker than patients in a clinical trial.
A bill to allow right-to-try nationally passed in the House in late March, but Senate leaders have not said whether they plan to take up the legislation. The Senate passed a different version of the bill by unanimous voice vote last year.
Thirty-nine states have allowed right-to-try, and Vice President Mike Pence has called it a priority. President Trump also called for passage during his State of the Union Address.
