MASSDEVICE ON CALL — The U.S. Senate will today move to vote on the FDA user fee bill, having come to terms on a bevy of amendments added to the measure.
The Senate will consider 17 amendments to the original bill, which was drafted in negotiations between the FDA and industry stakeholders and then passed to the White House, where it received a stamp of approval before heading to Congress.
The vote comes with a sigh of relief from Senate Democrats, as some worried that the bill may stagnate as GOP members of the Upper House offered amendments that threatened to derail progress toward a decision.
One such amendment was a short-lived measure by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to tie the user fee bill to his efforts to repeal the medical device tax. Hatch agreed on Monday to withdraw that effort in order to avoid derailing the FDA user fee discussion. Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) later vowed that he and others would introduce another amendment to repeal the "job-killing" tax.
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