Massachusetts Wants To Ban Gifts To Docs
The senate president has introduced a bill that would make the state the first to undertake such a move, which is being described as one way to keep a lid on prescription drug costs. The bill would prevent reps from offering gifts and ban docs from accepting gifts of any kind, The Boston Globe reports.
Not only that, the ban would extend to a doc’s staff and family members, although samples could be distributed, as long as the samples are for the exclusive use of patients.
The bill would also address several other health issues - provide loan forgiveness programs for students wanting to become nurses or primary care physicians; authorize the UMass Medical School to increase the class size of medical students and expand primary care programs and primary care residency training; establish a Massachusetts Primary Care Recruitment Center to attract primary care providers to rural and underserved communities; launch a medical malpractice study to investigate the high costs of medical malpractice coverage for health care providers.
The bill won the backing of health care advocates and providers. Jean Leu, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Prescription Reform Coalition, tells the Globe that banning marketing gifts could help bring down the costs of brand name drugs. “Pharmaceutical gifts undermine quality of care and unnecessarily increase prescribing of the most expensive drugs,” Leu says in a statement. “The cost of the gifts that pharmaceutical companies give physicians are passed on to consumers.”
Mike Webb, chairman of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, also welcomed the bill, but complained that the total ban on gifts could have unintended results. “We are concerned about any measures, such as bans on interactions with physicians, which could negatively impact information flow to practitioners and ultimately hurt patient care,” Webb tells the paper.
Justice in Michigan
Given the creativity of gifts that Ed has sometimes exhibited, it will certainly be difficult to distinguish between trinkets large and small, and “cme” in some broad sense or other (depending on who is arguing the case).
Former pharma Marketing Exec
This is a step in the right direction. It will be interesting to see what gets classified as gifts.
As for the last statement “We are concerned about any measures, such as bans on interactions with physicians, which could negatively impact information flow to practitioners and ultimately hurt patient care,” A cleaver statement but without bases of any sort. Information flow to physicians in the name of CME is a standard guise to market the product, the entire statement is a bit of an oxymoron.
Give the doctors the study without the interpretation of the marketing department (which is what most CME is). The doctors are usually smart enough to figure it out for
themselves.
Is it just me or does anyone find it so amazing that doctors go through so many years of schooling and then rack up so many years of practice in order to be told what to think and do by the MBA in the marketing department? There were many times when we knew that they knew we were blatantly marketing to them. But, they enjoyed the ride anyway, and who is going to turn down a freebie?
The biggest part of the budget was spent on AD Boards (Dear doctor come join us for 3 days in paradise and teach us how to sell this drug - we cover the cost). Most of those functions are really just schmooze fests..
Sure hope the senate can stay the course and make this a truly effective bill. What a great opportunity for change…
WBP
It’s about time that somebody started to track these gifts. Unfortunately, way too many of them are so well hidden that nobody will ever find them. Much more substantial is the cash that pharma pays to docs to give “talks”, consult, advise, etc. It’s disgusting the way this industry conducts its’ business. All they focus on is making more money!
Albert Camus
About time! It’s good to see an end to the moneyed interests in our health care. Pharma sales is still a big business, but at least the end of payola could help put us on the right track. I read another study today that places the costs of prescriptions far-and-ahead of the War in Iraq (the article is at http://www.health-insurance.org/prescription-drugs-vs-iraq-war ). Everybody on the news is talking about the costs of war. The true costs is right in our own pills.