Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13174

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

Surgeon Payments Disclosure Bill Advances
Integrity in Science Watch 2008 Mar 3
http://www.cspinet.org/integrity/watch/200803031.html#2

Full text:

Congressmen took aim at the often cozy relationship between medical device companies and surgeons at a packed Senate Committee on Aging hearing last week. The Physician Payments Sunshine Act, co-sponsored by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Herbert Kohl (D-WI), would require drug and medical device manufactures to disclose all financial dealings with doctors, including gifts, honoraria, travel expenses, educational grants, and funding for clinical trials. “These types of unethical payments are not anecdotal, but rather have been pervasive and industry-wide for far too long,” Kohl said in his opening remarks.

After executives from Stryker Corp. and Zimmer Holdings Inc. admitted widespread use of gifts and consulting fees to surgeons who use their hip and knee replacement products, Health and Human Services assistant inspector general Greg Damske testified that many consulting arrangements involve little or no work and are primarily used to buy loyalty from surgeons. In a New Jersey U.S. District Court settlement last September, five orthopedic implant manufacturers admitted paying more than $221 million to surgeons in 2007, and all but Stryker agreed to pay a $310 million settlement. “There were abuses and excess in the past, not just at Zimmer but across the industry,” admitted Zimmer vice president Chad Phipps.

The companies and the Advanced Medical Technology Association, the medical devices industry trade group, supported the sunshine bill, but pushed for weakening amendments. Charles Rosen, a professor at the University of California Irvine and President for the Association for Ethics in Spine Surgery, said the industry and surgeons were incapable of policing themselves and advocated even tougher laws. “It is so embedded now among most of the people running these societies, including the educational foundations, that I don’t think it’s possible to change that without something from the outside happening,” he said.