The revised version of a US Senate bill that requires drugmakers to report gifts and donations to the medical field would undermine a stronger Vermont law if passed, according to state officials and advocacy groups, The Rutland Herald reports.

The Physicians Payments Sunshine Act would require drugmakers to disclose gifts, payments, travel expenses and other financial donations to docs. But the reporting threshold under the proposed federal law is $500 - much higher than the $25 threshold found in a similar Vermont law passed five years ago. If passed, the federal bill would preempt the state law.

“Vermont was the first state to enact a law requiring that these payments be made public,” Assistant Attorney General Julie Brille tells the paper. “We’ve been doing this for four years now and we are very concerned with how this new Senate bill would affect that.”

After the Senate bill was watered down - fines were also reduced to between $1,000 and $50,000 for each violation, down from an earlier proposal of $10,000 to $100,000 - Lilly, AstraZeneca and Merck, and the PhRMA trade group, offered their support.

A spokesman for Patrick Leahy, a Democratic Senator from Vermont, tells the Herald that “there is a concern that the sponsors are tempted to sell out states like Vermont with stronger laws, in order to get Eli Lilly on board.”

Ashley Glacel, the press secretary for the Senate Aging Committee, whose chairman, Herb Kohl, co-sponsored the bill, tells the paper that she understands the concernsl, but added that the Senate bill is moree expansive because it also include device makers.

Vermont’s law also has a “trade secrets” provision that allows drugmakers to not report “large portions of their payments” to doctors and others in the medical field, Glacel added. “Our bill would increase reporting across the country,” she tells the paper. “All this information would be gathered at the federal level, but states could still easily access it.”

Vermont is one of only a handful of states that require drugmakers to report gifts and donations to docs, The Herald notes. The pharmaceutical industry spent $2.2 million in fiscal year 2006 (July 2005-July 2006) in gifts and donations to Vermont doctors, medical institutions and advocacy groups, according to a report by the Vermont Attorney General’s Office, which compiles the data and releases it annually, the paper reports.

That amount has been on the rise in recent years. Last year’s total donations were 2.3 percent more than the previous year’s allocation of $2.17 million. Compared with earlier years, the pharmaceutical industry spent nearly 16 percent more last year marketing to doctors than it did in fiscal year 2004, according to the Herald.