Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I rise today to talk about a serious public health crisis facing our Nation and to highlight some of the important progress we have made to date. We are currently confronting unprecedented shortages of critical medications. These drug shortages have impacted people across our country, forcing some patients to delay their lifesaving treatments, or use unproven, less effective, alternatives. In some cases, drug shortages have resulted in patients not getting the kind of treatment they had gotten or being slow in getting their treatment and being left behind. I have been working to address this problem for over a year since I first heard from hospitals, pharmacists, and patients in Minnesota that they were facing shortages of essential medications, particularly chemotherapy drugs. Their urgency led me to send a letter to FDA Commissioner Hamburg, urging the FDA to take action to address this public health crisis. Over the next few months, I continued to receive calls and visits from constituents, asking help to find medications in short supply. I worked with manufacturers, stakeholders, and the FDA to try to find an appropriate solution to ensure that patients continue to receive the care they deserve and they need. I would add, while in several cases the crisis was averted, this took hours and hours of individual pharmacists' time, individual doctors' time.…”