Address: At the Rare Hub, 1012 14th Street NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20005

RARE ACCESS ACTION PROJECT

RAAP is a coalition of life sciences and patient stakeholders that explores creative policy solutions to address structural issues in access and coverage. Our priority is to help ensure rare disease patients have access to the care and treatments that they need.

We generate action on this priority by leading initiatives designed to rectify the challenges facing all stakeholders: rare disease patients and their families, medical researchers and manufacturers, health care providers and payers.

THE NEED FOR ACTION

The life sciences community has created a long list of medical breakthroughs for people with rare diseases. Many additional significant advances are likely during this new decade. However, the U.S. health care system has been unable to keep pace to make these innovations widely available to patients.

After receiving the heartbreaking news of a rare disease diagnosis, families often learn that despite having health insurance coverage (commercial, Medicaid or Medicare), they do not have access to life-saving and/or life-enhancing medicines or technologies. As a society, we must continue to advance therapies through discovery and development, and we must make certain that patients can expeditiously access these breakthroughs once they are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This is why an ad hoc coalition of life sciences and patient stakeholders created the Rare Access Action Project in 2017. Please explore this website to learn more about RAAP.

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**Creating a Win-Win for Rare Disease Patients, HCPs & Payers**

As many as 30 million Americans currently live with a rare disease. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defines an orphan (rare) disease as a condition that affects fewer than 200,000 people nationwide. Some rare diseases have patient populations of fewer than one hundred people.

According to Global Genes, the highly respected patient advocacy group:

Three of 10 children with a rare disease won’t live to see their 5th birthday
Rare diseases impact more people than cancer and AIDS combined
There are 7,000 distinct types of rare and genetic diseases

Collectively, the diseases affecting the 30 million Americans represent a serious public health concern. Finding new technologies, including gene therapies, to save or improve their lives should be a societal imperative.

Nearly 40 years ago, a bipartisan commitment to finding treatments for rare diseases spurred tremendous innovation. The Orphan Drug Act of 1983 worked exactly as designed; it created incentives for manufacturers to develop new therapies for very small patient populations, sometimes fewer than 100 people. During the first 25 years of the Act becoming law, 326 new drugs were approved by the FDA and brought to market.

The Challenge

Today the U.S. health care system is struggling to make medical breakthroughs available to patients. Our health care system was designed in the 20th century with elements conceived over 50 years ago. Yet, 21st century innovations are critical to rare patients in need and our health system was not designed to make them readily available.

Patients and their families (50 percent of people with rare diseases are children) struggle to afford the co-payments associated with medications whose productions costs cannot be absorbed by millions of patients, such as drugs and devices for heart patients
Health care professionals struggle to provide the best care available to their rare disease patients if they can’t afford the treatment
Private and public payers (such as Medicare and Medicaid) struggle to manage mounting financial burdens and budgetary contstraints of supporting the medical and therapeutic needs of rare disease patients, particularly when a product might be used by only a few thousand, a couple of hundred or even a mere dozen individuals

Here are two critical issues that RAAP seeks to solve:

How do we as a society create incentives to advance therapies through discovery and development while also ensuring that patients can affordably access them once they are approved by the FDA?
How can we reduce these barriers and challenges in a way that balances all the competing imperatives, and maintain a commitment to finding new therapies for the 6500 rare diseases for which there are currently no effective treatment options?