Oregon Right to Try bill passes House committee

The House Committee on Health Care unanimously passed a bill Monday that would allow terminal patients access to therapies not yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, after strengthening safeguards in the legislation.

However, some say a few portions of the bill arbitrarily restrict access to a potentially life-saving policy.

House Bill 2300 now moves on to the House floor.

Among the amendments adopted into the bill were:

• The investigational product needs to have passed Phase I of clinical trials and be currently active in subsequent phases of clinical trial.
• Liability protection is provided to physicians, manufacturers, health care facilities, and anybody administering or distributing the investigational therapies.
• Insurers would need to be notified if their members access Right to Try.
• The patient could be charged no more than the cost of administering the therapy and manufacturing the product.
• Age limit is decreased from 18 to 15.

The amendments were submitted after the committee's chairman, Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland, convened a work group to discuss improvements to the bill.

Steve Buckstein, founder and senior policy analyst of Cascade Policy Institute, said there shouldn't be an age limit on Right to Try. In addition, the one-year definition of "terminal" in the bill rules out a lot of people who could benefit from the legislation.

Buckstein said children with terminal diagnoses could be the most powerful beneficiaries of a Right to Try law. Diego Morris, the 14-year-old cancer survivor who was the champion of Arizona's Right to Try campaign and visited Oregon to advocate for the bill, would have been shut out according to how the bill is written.

Buckstein said parents should be able to make decisions on behalf of their terminally ill children at every age, with no restrictions. In addition, he said, people who have terminal illnesses could live for years. They shouldn't have to wait until their last year to try investigational drugs.

Greenlick said the age and prognosis restrictions were a compromise between advocates like Buckstein and others who thought Right to Try should be only used in extreme circumstances and for adults only.

Oregon is part of a wave of states that have been passing similar laws in the last year. Mississippi on Monday became the 12th state to sign Right to Try into law.

syoo@StatesmanJournal.com, (503) 399-6673 or follow at Twitter.com/syoo.