The Obama
administration plans to establish new rules requiring pharmaceutical companies
to disclose the payments they make to doctors, according to the New York Times.
The new
rules are being issued under the new health care law and will make
pharmaceutical companies report money they have given to doctors for research,
consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment. The payment data will be made
available to the public online.
Companies
that fail to comply with the new rule could be subject to a penalty up to
$10,000 for each payment they fail to report.
The close
relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies has been a concern
for years. Drug companies have paid doctors up to $400 an hour to act as key
opinion leaders and some doctors earn more than $25,000 a year in advisory
fees.
Critics say
this encourages doctors to over-prescribe medication and harms public health.
Doctors who
take money from pharmaceutical companies are more willing to prescribe
medication despite potential risks, according to an analysis by the Times.
In
addition, a study published in the American Journal of Public Health found
drugs that pharmaceutical companies marketed most aggressively to doctors
tended to offer less benefits and more harm to patients.
“This is
not a random occurrence, but rather a repeating, planned scenario in which
drugs, discovered with good science for a specific set of patients, are
marketed to a larger population as necessary, beneficial and safer than other
alternatives,” Howard Brody, a professor and director of the Institute for the
Medical Humanities at UTMB Health and co-author of the study, explained.
Another
study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and
University of Chicago failed to find evidence that atypical antipsychotic
medication, a top-selling class of drugs, actually helped most patients. The
study was published January 2011 in Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety.
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