Notes from BIO: A Big Gap In Industry's Plan For Comparative Research

The biopharma industry has a big problem with the comparative effectiveness research provisions included in the stimulus bill enacted earlier this year.

As we noted in The RPM Report, it lacks several key elements that industry says need to be part of a functioning system, including an implementation process that they feel invovles their input. That sure makes a lot of folks at BIO very nervous.

Hence, an all-out lobbying campaign for new legislation to establish an independent institute to oversee comparative research.

The preferred approach was articulated by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus in legislation introduced last year, and industry hopes to see that vision included in any health care reform bill this year, Foley Hoag Attorney Barrett Thornhill said during a breakout session May 20.

There's just one problem: even in the best case scenario, legislation won't change how the initial bolus of funding--$1.1 billion--gets spent.

Thornhill, whose firm represents the Partnership to Improve Patient Care--an association funded by BIO and PhRMA and other organizations to lobby on CER--puts the chances of getting the Baucus proposal into health care reform at just 50/50. But even it if is included and signed into law this fall, he notes, a new institute won't be set up until the end of 2010 at the earliest, with research projects beginning no earlier than 2011.

So "you have this gap between when the [stimulus] funding gets handed out until you have new framework even established," Thornhill noted. "So its hard for us to go out and lobby to have this Conrad-Baucus entity just control the funding. The pushback is 'What are we are going to do for two and a half years? Just sit on our hands?'"

"That's not what the House Democrats are interested in doing," Thornhill says, "and I guarantee that's not what they are going to do."