For Immediate Release
RetireSafe Joins BIO in Calling for a Restructured, Strengthened FDA to Speed Needed New Cures and Therapies to Patients; Saving Both Money and Lives!
Washington, D.C. (June 29, 2011) — RetireSafe, a 400,000-supporter-strong, national advocacy group for older Americans, today called for a modernized Food and Drug Administration (FDA) focused on a new declared mission of speeding new lifesaving drugs, devices, and therapies to the patients desperately waiting for them. Thair Phillips, RetireSafe President, applauded Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) CEO Jim Greenwood for his leadership on this critical effort to bring about a new paradigm for drug development and approval, saying “innovation must be encouraged, rewarded, and sped to the market for patient use, if we are to meet our nation’s health care and economic needs.”
Phillips noted, “In the near future more than 72 million Baby Boomers will become Medicare beneficiaries.” “In a Medicare program closing in on its maximum ability to fund needed benefits, new, innovative medicines to address Alzheimer’s disease, Diabetes, Cancer, Heart disease and Stroke are vitally important,” he said. “When you consider the costs ahead, billions upon billions of dollars to treat a virtual epidemic of chronic disease, medical innovation means everything,” Phillips continued. “We must have a new, improved FDA to save and improve millions of aging lives and just as surely to save trillions of health care dollars in the coming years,” he went on to say.
Phillips emphasized the “proven ability of newer drugs to save seven times more in non-drug spending than they cost.” “These are exactly the drugs we need to speed to market,” he urged. “It shouldn’t take 15 years and more than $1 billion to get just one new drug approved,” Phillips stressed. “Tens of millions of long-suffering patients need a better FDA and a far faster approval process,” he stated.
“RetireSafe will continue to support every effort to ensure that innovative new drugs that could eradicate disease, new biomarkers that can clearly define the course of patient treatment, and new devices that will deliver medicine in previously unknown ways, all come quickly to the health care market, unimpeded by unnecessary costs and regulations,” Phillips concluded.
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