’Right to try’ bill draws backing from patients, biotech advocates and legal debate over civil liability

CONCORD, N.H. — House Bill 701, a proposal to expand so‑called “right to try” access for terminally ill patients, drew a crowded hearing Tuesday in the Senate Health and Human Services Committee.

Sponsor Representative Lisa Mazur described the bill as an effort to make New Hampshire “the best jurisdiction in the country for clinical trials and right to try for people with life‑threatening illnesses,” citing proximity to Boston’s biotech hub and a hope that the state could both save lives and attract clinical innovation.

Mazur said the bill would add three features not widely available in other states: clearer limitations on civil liability where a terminally ill patient consents, legal authority for a prescreening evaluation to be done remotely when the patient is dying, and a direct route to injunctive relief so providers need not wait for an enforcement action before asking a court to protect a patient’s access to treatment. “This will make New Hampshire competitive,” she told the committee.

Supporters at the hearing included patient advocates and national policy groups. Ian Hewitt, counsel for the Christian advocacy group Cornerstone, told senators that risk of civil suits currently deters providers and manufacturers from delivering experimental treatments and argued the bill’s informed‑consent waivers were critical. “Why should those people have to die just to maintain the precedent that civil liability shouldn't be waivable under state law through informed consent?” Hewitt asked.

The Goldwater Institute’s Brian Norman supported the bill’s expansion to allow individualized investigational gene therapies and called it an opportunity for the state to lead in making treatments available for rare and ultra‑rare diseases.

Opponents, including attorney Holly Haynes (representing the plaintiffs bar) and representatives of medical groups, said the bill would go too far in limiting liability and that existing statutes already provide reasonable protections. Haynes said the bill extends immunity beyond what states such as Montana have and warned the proposal risked stripping patients of remedies. She also said the bill could be inconsistent with federal human‑subject rules when individualized treatments and institutional review board oversight are implicated.

Several committee members focused on drafting details. Multiple witnesses and the sponsor described a late‑filed amendment by Senator Murphy that tightened the language on individualized gene‑therapy treatments and clarified that certain requirements apply only to truly individualized treatments performed in approved facilities. Proponents said the amendment fixed a drafting glitch that had inadvertently broadened an earlier draft.

Another practical question: witnesses noted that the state cannot control how other states apply their licensing rules and that telehealth prescreening protections in state law do not immunize out‑of‑state providers from their own licensing authorities. The sponsor and supporters acknowledged that and urged the committee to accept the narrow protections to remove disincentives for providers to offer compassionate access.

No vote was taken. Supporters said they will submit additional written testimony documenting families who waited for access to experimental treatments; opponents said they will file written legal analyses about liability and human‑subjects protections. Committee staff asked for clarification language and the sponsor agreed to circulate the amended language.

The hearing highlighted two recurring tensions: whether narrower legal protections for providers would produce more actual access to treatments for dying patients, and whether the proposals risked eroding long‑standing patient remedies. Both sides told the committee they were motivated by patients’ needs but differed sharply on how much liability reform was acceptable to produce access.