Laters, Veterans Issues either convention at a convention in maryland. Booktv is television for serious readers. The sunday on indepth code pink cofounder medea benjamin. Join our three hour conversation. We will take your phone calls even old, and tweets. Then on saturday, we are live from the Nations Capital for the National Book festival followed on sunday with lynne cheney. Those are some of the upcoming programs on cspan two2s booktv. Senator alexander a representative gordon were part of a recent forum on medical innovation. From the Bipartisan Policy Center, this is one hour and a half. Dr. Frist good afternoon. Today, we are going tos spend the next hour and a half talking about advancing medical innovation for a healthier america. How do we accelerate that innovation to the future . The United States has been a Global Leader in medical innovation for decades. Yet, tens of millions of americans have neither cures nor effective treatments for their diseases. This includes patients with alzheimers, parkinsons disease, certain types of leukemia. Etc. , we have about 10,000 known diseases that have been defined, the have names, science, and symptoms come up but we only have 500 treatments. We have a lot to do. The United States has invested over time, over the past 20 years, approximately 1. 5 trillion not billion, but trillion. However, if you look at those investments, they have not resulted in a commensurate level of progress in that whole process of discovery and development, and approval of medical products. Expensive and linked the Development Processes and up slowing down that advancement of medicine, and also slowing down the access to new and effective treatments. We all know, we hear the statistics that a new drug today takes about 2 billion in terms of investment, and about 10 years for that drug to reach the marketplace. For those individuals or patients facing a lifethreatening disease, who might be in Clinical Trials waiting for a jogdrug, that is too long. The clock is ticking way to slowly. The government plays a vital role in this process, working with the private sector, but it is something that needs three modernized with time as we have these advancements in terms of methodology, treatments, the lightning speed with which new devices and Information Technology is advance. The government plays that role in a lot of different ways, but the fundamental role is the fda which is the Regulatory Agency that oversees the safety and effectiveness of those medical products, drugs, and devices before the American People. As a former member of Congress Mark gorton, we are very aware of the role of government to a can either incentivize and lower the barriers or stifle Industry Growth and hold back, rain back those advances that science has out there and can be made possible if we get rid of those barriers. In a sentence, i think the easiest way to think of it is we cant rely today on 20th century technologies, technologies of the 1900s, the time when the fda was put in place. When the world is changing so fast, and when the world really is on a cutting edge of new health technologies, including Health Science and Information Technology we fundamentally have to modernize, bring up to date the way drugs and devices are developed and delivered in this country. It is time to act now. We will talk about the global implications. The time to act is now because we do have millions of patients out there waiting for cures that are on the shelf and ready to go. Congress, i legislative branch of government, plays a fundamental role in removing barriers, stripping them away, and creating an environment that fosters dynamism, creativity, and innovation that can accelerate development and Safe Delivery of effective products. Senator Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Health Committee , has given strong voice in advancing the United States leadership in medical innovation to improve our nations competitiveness across the globe. In january about seven months ago, chairman alexander released a report, innovation for healthier americans, identifying opportunities for meaningful reform. A little bit later that month, chairman alexander and linking member senator patty murray launched research on policies that will improve the development of medical products for american patients. Through our new effort at the Bipartisan Policy Center, advancing medical innovation, we seek to reform and support legislative efforts in the Safe Delivery of medical products to patients. That brings us here today. It is my great pleasure to introduce chairman alexander who has been in constant discussion with so many stakeholders over the last several months. Senator alexander was first elected to the United States senate in 2002. In january to of the 15, he became chairman of the Health Committee, where his Top Priorities were fixing no child left behind, regulating and reauthorizing the health act and modernizing the fda so we can bring more cures and medical devices to more people at less cost. He also chaired the appropriations committee. As a fellow tennessean yes, there is a tennessee mafia i do have to look at gordons leadership as governor. I played a tiny role in him coming to the senate. He really put tennessee on the map to become the thirdlargest auto producer in america. The state with the toprated fourlane highway system, and the first state to pay teachers a little more if they were teaching better than other teachers. Please join me in welcoming senator Lamar Alexander. [applause] sen. Alexander thanks. Ladies and gentelman, thanks for being here. Bill had a little bit more to do with my in United States senate. I was permanently retire from politics for the second time when he dropped around to see me in 2002 with a poll that said i could win a seat that was being vacated. They say the only cure for politics is an bombing e mbolmbing fluid. Of course, bill was majority leader. I had a chance to be on this committee, which is the senate Health Committee. The finance committee has a lot of jurisdiction, but we do too. Im delighted to be here with you and with him especially. I want to tell you one other story, which will explain why i plan to speak for just a few minutes and then listen for the rest of the time. Our former colleague, senator john warner, used to tell a story of when he was first in the senate. He was sitting there wondering what to do, and one of the older senators came over and put his arm around him and said, dont worry about this, you will get the hang of it in no time. All you have to do to be a United States senator is stand up, start talking, and eventually you will think of something to say. [laughter] i hope to disprove that today. I am a recovering governor, so i keep having bursts of executive leadership that i want to impose on the senate, which is not easy. When i became chair of this committee, i wanted to do something useful with it. We set three big rarities. One was to fix no child left behind, which we felt to do for seven years. Thanks to patty murray, the senior democrat, we were able to form a bipartisan working group. We got our bill through the senate 8117 last week, which is remarkable given the complexity of the issue at the difficulty of it. [applause] it shows that we are result oriented. The second thing we will try to do is deregulate simplify would be a better word federal rules and regulations governing higher education. A lot of wellintentioned rules from here. We have a variety of bipartisan efforts going on around that. The third area, which identified earlier this year, and are approaching in the same bipartisan way is to try to outline federal policies in such a way that we are able to move discoveries through the entire process of innovation, regulation, and investment into the medicine cabinet more rapidly, and at a lower cost. The house of representatives, as you know, has a similar goal, and has passed a bill they call 21st century cures. I was going to tennessee with president obama earlier this year when he went down to announce his Community College initiative. I told him what i just told you about three goals, and he told me about his interest in what he calls Precision Medicine. As a result of that, i went to the white house when he made an announcement about that, and i said to him, we will take your interest in Precision Medicine and incorporatede it in our work and while we are arguing about everything else, we will work in a bipartisan way and pass this. He thought that was a good idea. I have been working with secretary burwell, and senator murray, and i think it is fair to say that i think this is a train that will actually get to the station. You have the house that has already passed a bill, we are working on a similar bill, the president is interested in what we do, our time he is such that in order to get everything we want to get done, it will be thanksgiving or the end of the year before we finish our committee work, but that is no delay really because senator mcconnell would have time to put on the floor anyway between now and end of the year. With the kind of the support that it has now, and i expected to have at the end of the year i fully expected to be the kind of legislation that could be considered by congress and an election year. As senator frist said, it affects virtually every american. Members of our committee include Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren , lets just say we have a diverse committee. [laughter] we are all interested in the spirit see the importance of it. The question is, how do we know what to do . The big disconnect is between those of us in public life elected to do things, and everyone else out there who knows what to do, or is pretty sure they know. How do you get the two together . One person i thought of immediately to help was bill frist. I didnt know anyone who understood both, Biomedical Research, and the United States senate. Im sure there is someone who knows the senate better, and Biomedical Research better but nobody knows both better. I asked him if he was willing to help us design how to go about this. He said yes. He came up with the idea of working with a Bipartisan Policy Center. We have all these parallel tracks going. This is sort of the outside track. We will be conferring very carefully about your recommendations. I have a specific recommendation to make a bill, bart, janet, and those working on this. I will listen to the panel because i want to devote more structure time to learning what to do, by what you to take the excellent recommendations you have made in this report, and boil them down to a specific recommendations that we can send to Legislative Council. Bill and bart have a lot of experience doing that was something called un america competes about 10 years ago. Ive made a request to give a specific recommendations how to make our country more competitive. We asked for 10 recommendations. We got back 20. With bills leadership and the democratic leader at the time, we passed that in congress. Eventually, because we havent blueprint, it got done. It did not all get done in the first year, but migh most policies in washington fail because of lack of ideas. Another example is that i asked chancellor the chancellor of the arrested maryland about how to simplify higher education. They give us 59 recommendations, and 10 in priority order. We will include as many as possible as we can in our reauthorization of higher education. We dont want to be wasting money on bed tape, when we could be reducing tuition or hiring better professors, or giving scholarships to students. That is what i would like to ask you to do. Take those ideas. One other thing we stumbled across i say stumble, because it is true Electronic Medical records. Electronic medical records are a project the government has been involved in. It went well while the government was giving out 30 billion to doctors and hospitals. No one complained much about that, but now the money is gone. The system is a little bit in the ditch. There is a lot of complaining from the doctors at the hospital is about the next stage of Electronic Medical records because the system is not working very well. It has a variety of problems with it. That is essential to the presence decision medical initiative because, for example dr. Collins is trying to sequence one million human genomes, and Precision Medicine cant work very well if doctors cap easily use the information from your genome, as they make their diagnosis. It is important for that. And, it is important if we are going to be able to do a better job for patients in the United States. As part of this, we are looking for five or six steps that we can take to improve the Electronic Health record system in america, and make it something that doctors and hospitals look forward to, rather than dread. That is the goal. Im working with secretary burwell on that. If we come up with five or six things that she can do that by executive order, that is easier and cheaper. If it requires legislation, we have the strain running through that will get to the station and we will put it in there. I invite your participation. I thank you for what you have done. I delighted to work with the Bipartisan Policy Center especially with bill first and bart gordon, who i respect and know very well. I look forward to your comments this afternoon. I look forward to receiving, if you can, take those recommendations in your report, and boil them down to such specific suggestions we can send as many as possible to the Legislative Council to draft and include in our bill. Thank you very much. [applause] rep. Gordon i am very bart gordon that senator alexander mentioned earlier. I have had the good fortune of being on a number of panels making recommendations. I can tell you that when you put your time in, put your recommendation together, and it goes on the shelf, it is very discouraging. For all of you policy geeks you know how much fun it is when you put something together, and then you see an active in legislation. I feel even better listening to Lamar Alexander just been. Bill frist and i had the opportunity to watch him work with a pretty rowdy democratic legislator in tennessee, but he came forward. I think regular order is back in the senate, and we will be a better country for that. He will have a good partner in the house, someone that i had the good fortune to sit on the Energy Commerce committee with, and it reminds me when i think of her, i think of a story about the little engine that could. That is diana, plowing on having a Record Number of hearings, both here and across the district to come forward with a major bipartisan vote in the house. Senator alexander, you have a good partner here. Diana, tell us what is going on with you. [applause] rep. Degette thanks, bart. Im so happy to be here. They dont invite us to come over from the house very often. It is a treat for us. I was really happy to hear your reflections on some of these issues because as some of you know, chairman upton and i worked very hard. When you were talking about all the hearings we had, we had hearings, roundtables, you name it. We worked for about 18 months trying to get consensus. Many of the people in this room attended multiple of those hearings. You know what we are talking about. I was really pleased when i found out that senator frist and congressman gordon were heading up this effort because they really found many areas where we could take substantial updates to help bring cures to patients. The good news is this is similar to the consensus we found in the house. I think what it shows is that there really is a large amount of consensus about what we should do in the very latoya process, but also the resources that we need to bring to bear on expediting Biomedical Research and bringing it to the fda. Across the medical and research fields, as fred and i found, experts from all different backgrounds and sectors really agreed about the improvements we can make. Todays report that was released i have not read it in detail, but i read the executive summary, and it really offers us a lot of the same proposals but that echoes the things we heard in the house. I just want to highlight a few of the similarities that we have seen in the house investigation. For example, in the report, there are recommendations to more effectively include the Patient Perspective through the drug and Device Development process. Hr six has several provisions that echo this policy. In addition, there are several recommendations to strengthen publicprivate partnerships. This is something, again, that we highlighted. Further, there is a recommendation to accelerate the development and approval of antibiotics. This is a provision that has been a little bit controversial in the press, especially since hr six