As part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health care reform, drug companies will soon be required to report payments and free lunches/dinners/cruises/vacations/gifts to physicians or payments to teaching hospitals. It includes any free ‘educational’ service for physicians or teaching hospitals. This is section 6002 of the ACA and is known as the Physician Payment Sunshine Act (sunshine, as in shedding light on or transparency). As part of the mandatory reporting, individual physicians and hospitals will be named, along with what items of monetary value they received and by which companies. This information will be publically available and easily searchable. Companies will be assessed hefty fines of up to $1 million for failing to report the information. This Sunshine Act was supposed to have already been implemented, but has been delayed while government officials at the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare sift through public comment and iron out final details.
I read through the proposed Physician Payment Sunshine Act (vol 76,no. 243/12-19-11 Federal Register), and found that they define “physician” as a doctor of medicine or osteopathy, dentists, podiatrists, optometrists and licensed chiropractors. Teaching hospitals are defined as hospitals having graduate medical education. And here is their rationale for the Sunshine Act:
“2. Transparency Overview
Collaboration among physicians, teaching hospitals, and industry manufacturers may contribute to the design and delivery of life-saving drugs and devices. However, while some collaboration is beneficial to the continued innovation and improvement of our health care system, payments from manufacturers to physicians and teaching hospitals can also introduce conflicts of interests that may influence research, education, and clinical decision-making in ways that compromise clinical integrity and patient care, and may lead to increased health care costs.” (p. 7)
(The NYT has a recent article on this, as does Kaiser Health News–older but good.)
Several states including Vermont have already implemented similar reporting requirements. Some physicians are complaining that drug companies are now wooing more nurse practitioners as a way around the reporting requirements. I saw that in action at this past fall’s regional nurse practitioner conference. It was overrun by aggressive pharmaceutical reps waiving tons of swag (including the ubiquitous drug pens), as well as signing NPs up for free lunches/dinners/talks, etc.
In the community health clinics where I’ve worked, most all of the family physicians were rabidly anti-drug company marketing and influence. One physician in particular would go on a tirade if she discovered one of her medical residents writing with a drug company pen. They—and everyone else in the building—would get a lecture in the evils of drug company influence on physician prescribing practices and health care costs. So I thought I had long ago purged myself of all drug company free stuff. While preparing to write this blog post I engaged in some late winter housecleaning searching for hidden drug company subliminal influences. I found six drug company pens, four of which were for drugs that have been pulled from the market as unsafe. I threw them all away. On a popular blog lamenting the Sunshine Act, one physician complained that he has to buy pens for the first time since he graduated from medical school in 1986.
The only drug company swag I found that I am keeping is a funky glass sun catcher given to me by a retired pharmacist who lives on my street. It has elemental alchemy symbols for strange things like lead and vinegar and talc—but is really an advertisement for a nasal decongestant hidden in small type at the bottom. See if you can find it on the attached photo—but don’t buy the stuff!