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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

A Few Predictions on the Sunshine Act

By Genevieve Pham-Kanter
The Lab @ Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics - Harvard


The Sunshine Act–for those of you who did not meticulously read all 11,000 sections of Bill HR 3590–is that part of last year's health care reform law that requires pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers to report payments that they make to doctors for consulting services, speaking, meals, research grants, and other gifts of monetary value.

These payments have long been cause for concern because of their potential to influence the prescribing and research practices of payment recipients (for background, see this Institute of Medicine report). Surely requiring the disclosure of these potentially distorting payments would be a good thing; what more needs to be said?

The entire story is here.