Disclose Industry Payments to Advocacy Groups

Professional medical associations and health care advocacy groups receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical, medical device and insurance companies.  I’m making the case for disclosure of those payments and the resulting accountability.

These organizations have a lot of influence over the way taxpayer dollars are spent.  They weigh in on the policy debates in Congress.  Government agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rely on guidance from the organizations in writing rules and regulations and determining how public dollars are spent.

This week I renewed my call to 33 leading advocacy organizations to disclose payments they receive from industry. 

In 2009, after I worked to reveal that the majority of donations to the National Alliance on Mental Illness came from drug makers, the organization voluntarily set a standard for its peers by publicly posting information on a quarterly basis about outside support.  Even so, most organizations haven’t done much at all in the way of meaningful disclosure.  It’d be better for patients and taxpayers if every organization opted for meaningful transparency and disclosure.

Last year, the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, which I sponsored with Senator Herb Kohl, became law.  It will require, beginning in 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services to post on a public website newly reported payments that drug, device and biologic makers make to physicians.   In my new appeal to the advocacy groups this week, I reminded the groups that the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, known as MedPAC, has recommended similar statutory requirements for patient advocacy organizations.  I agree with MedPAC on the benefit of broader disclosure.  It’s a matter of accountability and the public’s right to know.

In addition to non-profit patient disease and medical advocacy groups, I’ve also conducted oversight and sought disclosure from medical journals about ghostwritten articles that originated with drug makers, medical colleges and continuing medical education.

Since 2007, I’ve conducted extensive congressional oversight of financial relationships between physicians involved in taxpayer-sponsored medical research and drug and device companies.  I uncovered numerous cases where there was a vast disparity between drug-company payments received and reported by leading medical researchers.  In direct response to this work, the National Institutes of Health, which distributes $24 billion in federal research dollars every year, proposed new disclosure guidelines for federal grant recipients.  A number of drug companies began disclosing payments to doctors voluntarily.  More than 40 universities nationwide began revising their own disclosure policies.