On the recordMarch 21, 2018
I thank the gentleman from Texas for yielding. I also pay my respects and give honor to Ron Johnson, the Senator from Wisconsin who championed the bill in the Senate and gave us a superb bill; also, Chairman Walden and his committee, who have worked hard to give us this bill today; and my original cosponsor on the bill that I introduced, Mr. Fitzpatrick from Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I want to address just a couple of things that I think are really intriguing to me because it certainly seems a bit condescending to me when I hear people say: I am not going to support this because it gives false hope that people might be taken advantage of by bad actors. They cannot identify the bad actors, but they might be taking advantage of them. That is a fallacious and specious argument to make when you are denying people who have a terminal illness, who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness, who have gone through the already approved FDA processes in order to get and petition a pharmaceutical company for an experimental drug that might prolong their life and might heal them. False hope, that argument, is the argument that I am hearing. But the reality is these people are individuals. They have a higher sense of reality than virtually anybody else I know because their mortality is there. They want the opportunity. It is not false hope. It is hope. Support of this bill is compassionate. Support of this bill is fair.…
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