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The ‘Right to Try’ Could Cost Dying Patients a Fortune
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-20/the-price-to-try-a-drug-could-be-300-000-for-dying-patients

“Companies cannot be NGOs,” the nongovernmental organizations that help provide care to impoverished countries, Brainstorm CEO Chaim Lebovits said in a phone interview. “We have to have an incentive.”

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Small drugmakers where much of the innovation in medicine originates can’t afford to provide their compounds for free, and terminally ill patients with no other options may be eager to pay for access.

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Health insurers don’t typically pay for treatments that haven’t been approved by regulators or proven to work in clinical trials. That means patients would have to pay for the therapies out of their own pockets.

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The law aims to simplify the process and bypass the U.S. Food and Drug Administration almost entirely -- its chief sponsor, Republican Senator Ron Johnson, recently put it bluntly, saying the goal was to “diminish the FDA’s power over people’s lives, not increase it.”