Political Quotes

“I want to comment for 1 minute on a statement made earlier on clinical trials to clarify it for people who are following the debate. We are going to have the opportunity to debate hopefully each of these patient protections to refine and improve them. Both the Frist-Breaux-Jeffords and the Edwards bill have clinical trials addressed as a patient protection, as a right of a patient to have access to clinical trials if they are in employer-sponsored health care. We do have to be very careful about coverage of clinical trials. What we started with was trying to figure out how many clinical trials are going on today. Under the Frist-Breaux-Jeffords bill, we include coverage by the Veterans' Administration clinical trials, all the clinical trials in the National Institutes of Health, and Department of Defense clinical trials. The issue is on the FDA, and the FDA obviously does wonderful clinical trials. One concern we need to address is how many clinical trials is the FDA doing. I was going to ask the Senator from North Carolina earlier how many clinical trials are there in the FDA. Since we are taking people's money to pay for it, we need to know how much it is going to cost. It is unclear at this juncture, and we need to work together to see how many there are. In fact, we do not know today how many FDA clinical trials are being conducted as part of FDA protocol.”