It’s even journalism, as in making a journal entry. captain’s log, web log, journal entry are semantically equivalent in essence.

Seriously, if you have time, you should follow Jane’s advice @ 10 and submit a Seminal diary on that call and your insight re the answer.

And we can be civil, I think we gain a lot more that way. Leave the anger and rancorous debate to the teabaggers.

Greetings,

I met you at the Palo Alto office on October 30 as part of a small demonstration opposing Congresswoman Eshoo’s legislation on biosimilars. You gave me a packet with information that had Congresswoman Eshoo saying her legislation prohibits evergreen exclusivity, I asked you for a cite for the relevant language.

I’ve done the research myself already. While Congresswoman Eshoo’s statement that her legislation prohibits evergreen data exclusivity can be defended her language is open to other interpretations. In particular this clause troubles me: (pg1538, lines 8-10, ‘‘(I) a change (not including a
modification to the structure of the biological product’ ). A minor structural modification (the PEGylation process is a good example of this) restarts the exclusivity. This type of change does not require “billions of dollars”, it can be done by a well equiped high school lab. And this clause makes it much harder to give credence to the Congresswoman’s claim that she prohibits evergreening.

Senator Schumer introduced a different biosimilars bill in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee. It differs from Congresswoman Eshoo’s bill in many ways that I support. One key difference is his language on evergreening is much less ambiguous.

Setting aside the 5 year versus 12 year exclusivity period (I know Congresswoman Eshoo is unlikely to change on the exclusivity period even though there’s a strong case that it should be shorter) I’m wondering whether my representative will work for stronger and less ambiguous language on evergreen exclusivity. Her claim that she already prohibits evergreening tells me she truly wants to do so; I’d be very pleased to see her set aside her work for much stronger work to accomplish that common goal. I’m petitioning her to work with the speaker to introduce the appropriate amendment to substitute section (10) from S.726 into HR3200.

As I said to you on Friday, we need to be working to make these medicines more affordable, and I see Congresswoman Eshoo’s work as making sick people have to choose between life and bankruptcy. The beneficiaries of her work here are investors in biotechnology – their return on investment is increased at a cost to the general public that is far too high.

Sincerely yours,

–
wmd1961 (name elided for privacy reasons)

Having an actual email address for a staffer is a big win over the web contact form. Using the web form means no context from previous emails, you can’t even cc your message to yourself. So you get a boilerplate response that doesn’t address your issues, rinse, repeat until frustrated. I’ve complained about it during calls to her office.

With a live person’s email that shouldn’t happen. I’ve had some history on this with Baron Hill (email to staff ignored), Evan Bayh (ignored), Richard Lugar (long term engagement with staff – they read the books I sent and clearly read and digested the information). My hope is Eshoo’s staff will be responsive.

There was all kinds of hell raised about Cheney and his secret meetings with energy producers; why hasn’t there been the same sort of response to Obama’s deals?