Healthy Skepticism Library item: 10742
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
Harris G.
Senators to Push for Registry of Drug Makers’ Gifts to Doctors
New York Times 2007 Jun 28
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/washington/28doctors.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1183036503-F7y6ALH0npln5IKkaYzdPw&oref=slogin
Full text:
WASHINGTON, June 27 – In the midst of a Senate hearing about the money and gifts that drug makers routinely provide to doctors, Senator Claire McCaskill mentioned that she had a brother who runs a restaurant.
“And he said that the most lucrative part of his business was the private room that is used mostly by drug companies” to entertain doctors, said Ms. McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri. “He said that you wouldn’t believe how much expensive wine these guys buy.” The tab often totals thousands of dollars, she said later.
Marjorie Powell, senior assistant general counsel for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, assured Ms. McCaskill that major drug makers no longer offer doctors expensive dinners. The industry’s code of ethics mandates that free meals be modest – pizza, for instance, Ms. Powell said.
“I would, with all due respect, suggest that there has been a change in your brother’s restaurant in recent years,” she said.
Ms. McCaskill pressed, “Are they allowed to buy alcohol?”
Ms. Powell responded, “Our code does not go into that level of detail.”
The senator said, “So they can.” The hearing did not go well for the drug industry. At its end, Ms. McCaskill and Senator Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat who is chairman of the Special Committee on Aging, said they would push for legislation that would create a national registry of gifts and payments to doctors by the makers of drugs and medical devices.
Ms. McCaskill said the Senate was in the process of adopting ethics legislation that would bar senators from accepting meals from lobbyists. And any gifts or payments to senators must be recorded, she said.
“And if it’s good for Congress,” she said later in an interview, “it’s good for the medical profession in terms of cleaning up all this lobbying – because that’s what it is.”
Mr. Kohl said that if the industry’s gifts and payments to doctors were appropriate, no one should object to making them public. He said he was concerned that the payments and gifts have “an impact on the quality and cost of medical treatments.”
Drug makers continue to underwrite expensive meals and weekend getaways for doctors, according to dozens of interviews with doctors.
For instance, in a letter dated Dec. 4, AstraZeneca, a London company, invited doctors to attend a weekend training session in February at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, Fla., to learn how to give marketing lectures for Symbicort, an asthma medicine. In addition to paying doctors’ flight, car and hotel costs, AstraZeneca offered a $2,700 stipend, according to an invitation letter.
Michele Meeker, a spokeswoman for AstraZeneca, said that the Florida event had complied with all industry ethics guidelines and that the stipend was “fair market value for their time.”
Asked whether the drug industry would support a mandatory national registry of payments and gifts to doctors, Ms. Powell told the committee that similar state efforts had become enmeshed in difficult details – like deciding whether free drug samples should be classified as gifts.
“There are those kinds of complexities that would make a registry very difficult,” she said.
After the hearing, Ms. Powell’s trade association released a statement criticizing the state registries, saying they “disarm doctors by inhibiting access to critical scientific information about the benefits and risks of treatment options that help patients win their battle against disease.”
The laws have led to some embarrassing disclosures: that some doctors earn hundreds of thousands of dollars from drug makers, that doctors who are paid by drug makers tend to prescribe more of their drugs, and that some doctors who have been hired to perform clinical trials have serious medical disciplinary records.
A New York Times/CBS News poll in February found that respondents overwhelmingly disapproved of doctors’ accepting payments from drug makers.
