Greg Walden: “I appreciate my colleague's amendment on this. I understand it. And I think it is important because it does strike at…”

“I appreciate my colleague's amendment on this. I understand it. And I think it is important because it does strike at the heart of the issue and the concerns many of us on this side of the aisle have. The California Life Sciences Association told us that, if enacted, H.R. 3's Medicare part D foreign reference pricing proposal would reduce by 88 percent the number of drugs brought to market by small and emerging companies in California alone due to changed investor behavior. So they think up to 88 percent of the great innovations and cures they are working on will never come to market. They also think it would eliminate 80,000 biotech R&D jobs nationwide and reduce revenues by $71 billion a year. So, these are the people, predominantly out in California, that do this every day, that are living in this world of trying to create innovation and new lifesaving drugs. And they are saying up to 88 percent of the new drugs they are working on would never come to market. These are the small startups. We have heard a lot from others on the floor in the last 24 hours about Big Pharma. Well, we are not talking about Big Pharma here. We are talking about small, little startups, American entrepreneurs. If you think about Silicon Valley in the high-tech world, this is the equivalent in the biotech world.…”