WASHINGTON — Rep. Anna Eshoo, one of the House of Representatives’ top Democrats on health care issues and a longtime pharmaceutical industry ally, is planning to retire, she announced Tuesday.
Eshoo’s retirement after 32 years in Congress will be yet another loss of a Democratic supporter for the pharmaceutical industry — and they didn’t have many to begin with. Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) is also retiring. Sen. Bob Menendez’s (D-N.J.) future remains uncertain after he was charged with bribery.
Eshoo, whose district includes Silicon Valley, is the top Democrat on the House Energy & Commerce panel’s health subcommittee, where she has jurisdiction over the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and a wide range of health care issues.
“[Eshoo] is one of the country’s most accomplished legislators. She has a long and successful history of working to improve access to affordable health care. While we might not have always seen eye-to-eye on specific policy choices, I knew she’d done her homework and her heart was in the right place,” said former Energy & Commerce Committee Chair Greg Walden, a Republican who worked with Eshoo for years on health care policy.
She often pushed for policies that would promote the pharmaceutical industry and medical innovation. One of her signature achievements was adding a provision to the Affordable Care Act ensuring biologics have 12 years of market exclusivity before competitors can enter.
Her efforts earned her the ire of drug pricing reform advocates. The patient advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs spent half a million dollars on ads attacking Eshoo in 2018, highlighting more than $1.5 million in pharmaceutical industry donations to her over her decades in office.
While she generally supports the biotech and pharmaceutical industry, Eshoo hewed to House Democrats’ party line and voted to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Both industries opposed the legislation, and the brand-drug lobby PhRMA and a handful of drug companies have sued to block it.
She also was a major advocate of insurance reforms. She was responsible for requiring insurance to cover reconstructive surgery following mastectomies, and she spearheaded a key component of Obamacare that caps catastrophic out-of-pocket spending.
Eshoo is also a keen overseer of the National Institutes of Health. She pushed to keep the Biden administration’s experimental health research agency ARPA-H outside of the NIH, though the Biden administration chose to ignore her requests.
She has also pressed NIH for answers about their use of more than $1 billion to study long Covid and potential treatments, following STAT reporting that the agency’s efforts were slow to get started, and focused more on observational research than actually testing treatments.
In 2021, she also grilled a top FDA official about approving more medicines to treat the neurodegenerative condition ALS. About a year later, the FDA approved a new Amylyx drug in 2022 to treat the condition.
The medical device industry also is a fan of Eshoo, who wrote the law that increased FDA funding of device reviews by charging the industry user fees. Stephen Northrup, who was the CEO of the Medicare Device Manufacturers Association from 1998 to 2002, said the trade group awarded her “legislator of the year” during his tenure.
“Anna Eshoo was a great ally to medical technology entrepreneurs in fighting for modernization of the FDA from the 1990s into this century, and she’ll always be remembered fondly by those of us who worked with her closely during those years,” Northrup said.