Terminally ill patients are expected to have “six or less months to live” which is usually caused by incurable diseases such as cancer, advanced cardiac diseases and ALS (Hogan 2016).  Ill patients all around the United States are dying from terminal diseases. Many have listed certain diseases like cancer, ALS, and others as an unavoidable death mark. A study hosted by Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care shows, “7 out of 10 Americans die from chronic disease. More than 90 million Americans live with at least one chronic disease.” (PBS 2005). If you had the opportunity to get a terminally ill patient the kind of help they needed, almost everyone would in an instant. This is because the population cares for each other we have sympathy and empathy that is unequivocally matched. With the Right to Try Acts terminally ill patients can gain access to experimental medications and treatments. They are also commonly referred to as the Compassionate Acts due to the fact that their popularity is based off of the caring and sympathy for terminally ill people. The Acts have been in review for the past decade and are more important now than ever. The Acts have been reviewed and added on to legislatively as recent as September of 2017 (Kaplan 2017). The Right to Try Acts have gained more ground in the past year than they have in the past decade due to the overwhelming public support of them. The Acts as a whole are not what they could be in total, with the continual work from the government and support from the public the Right to Try Acts can become a realistic beacon of hope for patients who have lost theirs. The Right to Try Acts are very successful require revision and attention. 

The Right to Try Acts are a set of laws and bills that give patients leniency when trying to access untested medication, biometrics, and treatments. The Acts “make drugs available outside of clinical trials” (Servick 2014). The FDA runs a process of generally three phases to test any medicine or treatments effectiveness and safety before releasing it to the public. Patients in dire need of treatments could receive them before the Right to Try Acts were legalized but the process was very sluggish which makes quite the frustrating situation for Patients who may only have years, months or even weeks left to live. The Acts simply allow patients to access treatments that are in Phase 1 testing which gives them access to the medication exponentially faster than they would get with the normal FDA testing.  The FDA has a very time consuming process, before the Right to Try Acts it takes about twelve years on average for any drug to make it through the FDA’s approval process given it makes it at all, the process and most of the drugs that the patients could need may never even reach Phase 2 trails, “Only about one in 10 drugs in phase I clinical trials ever demonstrate efficacy to win Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval” (Servick 2014).  The drugs that terminally ill patients can acquire more easily may be looked at as a long shot but almost everyone would rather have a chance even if it’s a dying chance than no chance at all. Without these laws terminally ill patients are left dead in the water, and everyone would agree that they should be thrown a life preserver. The effectiveness of said life preserver is yet to be discovered but with continual research and patients supporting trial medications the likelihood of success is ever increasing. Patients could look as these medications as a gateway into a prolonged life and one day back to their original state. 

The Right to Try Acts are gaining more and more support every month, the Acts were even becoming a national phenomenon as early as 2014. Before the Right to Try Acts were active there was only two ways for patients to gain access to experimental medicine, the first is the patient could be enrolled in a clinical trial which is separate from the FDA and is usually hosted by a private company or corporation. Clinical trials are not very effective for patient’s treatment because it may not be the exact medication they need or they may never be accepted to the trail. There is a second way for a patient to gain access to experimental medication without the Right to Try Acts, they can directly ask the FDA for approval of the medication, which sounds very simple. However, this can take at least “three hundred hours of bureaucratic red tape and work”, and like many citizens know about government organization work very leisurely, especially when they have three hundred hours of work for one person (WSJ, 2014). Along with the copious amounts of work the FDA and the patient has to go through to gain approval there is a large possibility that the patient is denied access even after all of the red tape has been cut through. These methods ineffectiveness show why the Right to Try Acts gained so much popularity among the public even as early as 2014. Revisions of the right to try acts are still taking place as recently as September of 2017. The importance of improving the Acts is not lost among the public or even among legislation which is commonly known to be easily sidetracked. 

The legalization of these Acts were not all at once necessarily but very gradually, in 2014 three states had already passed the Right to Try Acts and taken a big step forward for and by their citizens, these states included Colorado, Missouri and Louisiana. Arizona was also on the way to putting the Right to Try Acts as a part of their own legislation in September of 2014. The legalization is a state by state basis as of today and has not been enacted nationally. Currently there are thirty-eight states that have passed the laws. Many of the north-eastern states including Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey still have yet to legalize the Right to Try Acts. Many of these state citizen who become terminally ill are faced with the choice of staying in their home or moving to a state with a better opportunity than there is where they currently live. The supporters of this bill are often referred to as “Dallas Buyers Club” supporters in reference to a movie in which a man smuggles in unapproved AIDS treatments into the United States to help his companions who are terminally ill with him. There are similar legislative acts called the Right to Die Acts, which given patients the opportunity in certain situations to choose assisted suicide rather than to live with a terminal illness. Patients in places such a Vermont who have access to the Right to Die Acts but not the Right to Try Acts are having their basic human rights taken away from them. No one should give a terminally ill patient a way to end their own life but not a way to save it. In August of 2017 there was a separate bill that was addition to the Right to Try Acts which “expanded access to experimental treatments for people with terminal illnesses”, this shows that the Acts are still being improved upon today (Kaplan 2017). 

The general principle of the Right to Try Acts is very easy to understand even for most of the uninformed public. However, many of the specific details are not known by the majority in which the critics make their arguments against the Acts and that the Right to Try Act’s “effectiveness remain largely unknown” (Dresser 2015). There are many reasons why there is a hefty amount of medical data that is unaccounted for to the public. Most of the recorded data whether effective or ineffective is kept very privately between the company that the experimental treatment belongs to, the doctor or doctors that are advising the patient on their medical decisions and the patient who is terminally ill and undergoing the experimental treatment. There is some amount of data that can be legally posted from these encounters but there is a large amount of red tape, but these experimental treatments are treated medically the same as normal treatments when it comes to any patients privacy. The majority of experimental drugs data comes from patients who are not terminally ill and are listed in a public clinical trial. However these patients would not be using the convince of the Right to Try Acts in the first place which leaves room for the private data of patients to be kept private. Dresser in her skewed argument against the Right to Try Acts states, “A rigorous clinical trial system is essential to determining whether investigational drugs are sufficiently safe and effective to be approved for the general patient population”, conceptually she would be correct if there was clear evidence to show that any and all Phase 1 approved medications were always unsafe and ineffective (Dresser 2017). She is claiming that the Right to Try Acts give false hope to patients. Nevertheless, these uninformed claims are not accurate because theses experimental medications do have a tendency to help terminally ill patients. Even if it were to help anyone out of one and one million patients, which it is much more effective than that that, it would still give patients a chance to have realistic and obtainable longevity that they could not achieve without the Right to Try Acts. Although though these acts can be viewed as a “last ditch effort” with the right reformations they can become a realistic way for terminally ill patients to seek proper medical treatment (Yeager 2017). 

Patients cannot always wait as long as the FDA needs them to for their safety precautions. Thus the creation of the Acts, however with the common speed and readiness of the Right to Try Acts comes downsides. The official description of the Acts read “A manufacturer, distributor, prescriber, dispenser, possessor, or user of such a treatment has no liability regarding the treatment.” (Congress 2017). In short this statement means that if the drug is ineffective or even harmful the company providing it cannot and will not be held accountable. This is where the Acts need reformation, with limited liability the patient and the company can be more secure on an undiscovered treatment plan. The company in the case of the patients’ lack of success or longevity should firstly provide the family with 50% of the total amount of invested money into the experimental treatment. Secondly the company should open their acceptance of payment through insurance plans in which they are currently not. If the companies were to reform to these polices insisted by the government it would also have to affect the insurance companies legally, patients would have to pay a higher rate but would be covered if they became terminally ill and wish to pursue investigational medicine. Insurance companies would pay for the entirely or portion of the medication if the patient has their policy. This process would make the nervousness and doubt on the families and supporters of the patients less it would also draw more terminally ill patients into the experimental process, this would in turn decrease the amount of research funding the drug companies would have to put into their medication. “The estimated cost of Research and development for a new drug is estimated to cost between $4 and $11 billion.” (Hogan 2016). The process of creating new medications is very expensive, time consuming and often unsuccessful. Reforming the Right to Try Acts can help the patients gain access to phase one medications, it would also assist the companies in the creation of new medications as well as the time and money that goes into researching new medications. The insurance companies would initially not indulge into this process due to the risks of insuring a high risk patient. This would require a legislative push which takes place in the reformation of the Right to Try Acts. 

These are very simple laws for the population to understand and back, yet the simplicity behind these do not make them any less effective for patients in need of quick access to necessary medications. There are still a number of states who choose not to have these laws put into their place, which raises public concern for the lack of compassion the legislatures seem to have for their citizens, peers, and common man. This is not a call for rioting or any aggression toward the opponents of the Right to Try Acts, rather an informative guide to help anyone who is inspired to help someone who has been diagnosed terminally ill. The Acts can become more and more helpful to the patients in need through the simple support of the public. The more public support that is heard by legislative authorizes creates more politics that want the publics approval. The Acts are not perfect in any sense of the word, they need as much tending to and compassion as the patients it provides for. With the right amount of work, funding and provision the Acts can do fully what they were meant to when they were initially created. When the Right to Try Acts are legalized in every state the entire nation can feel the kind of hope that only seventy-six percent of the nation does now. In time the Acts could become not only a gateway for patients who need it but a permanent solution for many illnesses that are now deemed as incurable. On the contrary if the Right to Try Acts were fully functional in every state the amount of research private or public gathered from people who must access the Acts avenue could result in the curing of now terminal diseases such as AIDS, ALS, and certain kinds of cancer. Either of these scenarios could be obtainable with the support of the public for their common man, driven by their empathy, compassion and what logically is the obvious answer to the help and progression of the United States and human kind. 
