Health care activists complain that the state needs to plug a big loophole that allows doctors to receive pay for research and work on clinical trials without disclosing it. “They need to go further,” Lisa Kaplan Howe, policy manager at Health Care for All, tells The Boston Herald. The state legislature passed the gift ban last summer as part of a health care cost-containment bill.

If the new rules are approved, Massachusetts docs will be prohibited from accepting pens, tchotchkes, vacations and most free meals from drug and device makers (back story), they will also be required to report any money they receive to promote products. But if doc are paid to provide research or test drugs, they don’t have to disclose those payments, although all other payments of $50 or more would need to be disclosed publicly.

Tufts University professor Jerome Kassirer, whose book, “On The Take: How Medicine’s Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health,” portrays America’s health-care system as a commercial enterprise, calls the exemption “unfortunate…We shouldn’t be hiding any kind of personal relationships between pharmaceutical companies and physicians, because of the possibility that any kind of money that goes to physicians could produce some sort of bias,” he tells the paper.

In a statement, Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner John Auerbach says the council allowed the research payments to remain private to keep clinical trials in the state. Forcing drugmakers to reveal which docs they hire could mean fewer clinical trials in Massachusetts and that trials help preserve the state’s reputation as a place for cutting-edge medical research.

“We also wanted to strike a balance by promoting broad transparency of financial dealings between the industry and health care providers, while at the same time recognizing important and legitimate research occurring in Massachusetts,” he maintained. Earlier this year, pharma threatened to reduce clinical trial activity in the state over an earlier version of legislation (back story).

But state Senator Mark Montigny, who has advocated for complete disclosure of the financial relationship between drugmakers and docs, says the regs fell short of even the compromise approved by the legislature.

“These regulations grossly manipulate the spirit and the letter of the law that I wrote, and we are going to try to reverse them,” he tells The New Beford Standard Times. “We are going to appeal to the governor and the public health community to throw out these regulations that were clearly written by big pharma, not little research scientists in white coats.”

The council will hold two public hearings in January and is expected to vote on the new regulations in February. The new rules would take effect July 1, with public disclosure required annually.