Ga. cheers medical bill’s expected OK

Bipartisan measure designed to speed new treatments to patients.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate appeared on track late Tuesday to send a medical innovation bill to the president’s desk that would set aside billions in new research money for which Georgia universities could compete and provide special aid to an Atlanta hospital.

The measure, the 21st Century Cures Act, marks one of Congress’ few bipartisan accomplishments of 2016 and comes after three years of negotiations on Capitol Hill.

It sailed through a procedural vote in the Senate on Monday evening, 85-13, with the support of Georgia’s two GOP senators. The chamber was expected to easily pass the measure sometime today.

The legislation is designed to accelerate the development of new medical treatments. It would authorize $4.8 billion in new funding for the National Institutes of Health over 10 years for initiatives to eliminate cancer and promote treatments tailored to a person’s unique genetic makeup, among others.

It also seeks to address the national opioid abuse crisis, improve the country’s mental health treatment system and make changes to the Food and Drug Administration’s review process for drugs and medical devices.

President Barack Obama is expected to quickly sign the measure into law in one of his final legislative acts. It is supported by a slew of medical research and patient advocacy groups, including many Georgia stakeholders.

“You look at the 48,000 people being diagnosed with cancer in Georgia this year, and what this bill really does is provide more money for research to develop new treatments that are going

to be hopefully beneficial,” said David Pugach, director of federal relations for an arm of the Atlanta-based American Cancer Society. “It’s going to provide those cancer patients with more access to clinical trials.”

A small and unorthodox group of conservatives and liberals has come out against the measure.

The criticism from the right focused on how the bill would be paid for. The conservative Heritage Action blasted the bill’s authors for relying on “budget gimmicks.”

Liberals such as Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, framed it as a giveaway to big pharmaceutical companies.

“I know the difference between compromise and exploitation,” Warren said last week in a blistering speech on the Senate floor.

Georgia provisions

Clocking in at more than 800 pages, the legislation is technically a package of many separate health care bills that Congress has kicked around for years. It’s among the largest public health measures of Obama’s tenure.

Jonathan Lewin, the executive vice president for health affairs at Emory University, said the school could benefit from the additional NIH research dollars, for which it would compete. (Emory received $333 million in grants and contracts from NIH during the past budget year, he said.)

The money “is going to directly benefit not only economically the state of Georgia through increased grant funding, hopefully to Emory and to the region, but also to our patients as it translates to new cures, new technologies and likely new startups from intellectual property,” he said.

Atlanta’s Shepherd Center, which specializes in rehabbing people suffering from the aftermath of strokes, and brain and spinal cord injuries, is specifically aided in the bill.

A clause aims to iron out issues created by a change Congress made to how longterm care hospitals get paid in 2014 that unexpectedly hurt Shepherd and a similar facility in Colorado.

“It doesn’t give us more money or anything like that. It excludes us from that (2014) legislation because we’re different and gives us two years to work with Medicare to find a place where Shepherd Center fits into the Medicare system,” said Gary Ulicny, the president and CEO of the hospital.

Georgia Republican U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson had a hand in crafting the bill as a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

He folded into the measure an extension of a voucher program aimed at providing incentives for the treatment of rare pediatric diseases. Isakson said the provision was inspired by Alexa Rohrbach, a Georgia girl with neuroblastoma whom he met more than a decade ago.

“Alexa got her angel wings a few years ago and is in heaven looking down today, but I’m testifying on Alexa’s behalf that the more we can do to accelerate research and development for cures of rare diseases, the more we’re going to make the lives of people happy and long, rather than short and sad,” Isakson said in a speech on the Senate floor last week.

Other Isakson-authored provisions would provide Medicare coverage for home infusion therapy services and direct the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track information about neurological diseases such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease.

Isakson, who announced last year that he’s been suffering from Parkinson’s since 2013, said knowledge gleaned from studying one of those diseases could help cure others. “So by having a combined registry on neurological diseases of a degenerative nature, you get a body of work from which researchers can work that’s complete,” he said in an interview. “It encourages information to be shared by all the people who have the information.”

Another Georgian, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, also authored language in the bill related to the training for law enforcement officers who engage with people with mental health conditions.

“The common-sense approach to mental health treatment complements criminal justice reform efforts and ultimately serves the law enforcement community, overburdened court systems, mental health sufferers, and the taxpayers whose money goes to public health and safety measures,” the Gainesville Republican said of the provision.

No Georgia lawmaker voted against the bill, which passed the House of Representatives with nearly 400 supportive “ayes,” but Atlanta Democrat John Lewis and Coweta County Republican Lynn Westmoreland did not vote.