Disclose Financial Ties to Build Public Trust

My work continues to establish greater transparency when it comes to financial ties between drug companies and the practice of medicine.  Public trust and public dollars are at stake.  People rely on medical advice based on federally funded biomedical research, and taxpayers spend billions of dollars on prescription drugs and devices through Medicare and Medicaid.

I’ve conducted oversight and sought disclosure from physicians conducting highly influential, taxpayer-sponsored medical research; medical journals which publish articles ghostwritten by companies; medical colleges shaping the future of medicine through research and education; continuing medical education for doctors; and patient advocate groups that receive unreported income from industry.

Today, legislation I first introduced two years ago to require drug, device and biologic manufacturers to report payments to physicians is included in the major health care reform bill advancing in the Senate.  The legislation I sponsored with Senator Herb Kohl, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act (S.301), would establish the first-ever nationwide requirement for this information to be reported.  Reports would be required annually and made publicly available.

This week, I sent another letter about transparency and accountability in medical research.  I asked the new director of the National Institutes of Health to explain a report of a research doctor being paid tens of thousands of dollars by a pharmaceutical company for consulting on a cardiovascular drug while also working on taxpayer-sponsored cardiovascular research.  Current federal regulations require the medical school to report this information, but there are numerous cases where they’ve failed to do so, despite very large sums of money being involved.  I’ve been pressing the National Institutes of Health to more faithfully and aggressively enforce this requirement.  There’s no excuse for a trustee of tax dollars to not fulfill its responsibility, and the NIH is in a position to make a major impact in establishing greater transparency of financial ties between drug companies and research doctors.  
 
Based on the investigations I’ve led already concerning NIH grantees and drug company payments, over 40 universities nationwide are revising their disclosure policies, and the NIH is revising its reporting guidelines.  I will be meeting with the NIH Director to discuss the changes.

This latest incident will add to the case I’ve built for an overhaul and real enforcement of an effective federal policy to protect public health and taxpayer dollars.