A House committee advanced a Republican bill banning certain methods for measuring the effectiveness of prescription drugs, a move backed by major disability rights groups but opposed by the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest critics.
The legislation (H.R. 485) the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved Friday on a 27-20 vote would end federal use of QALYs, a way of measuring the effectiveness of a drug by weighing how many years of life the medicine could give a person. It’s part of a slate of GOP-sponsored health bills the committee considered, including one to permanently ban illicit fentanyl knockoffs.
Democrats, ...
