Massachusetts May Ban All Drug Industry Gifts to Doctors

Wednesday, October 08, 2008 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer
Tags: drug industry, health news, Natural News

(NaturalNews) The Massachusetts Senate will consider a bill to ban all gifts by pharmaceutical companies to doctors, which would be the first such ban in the United States.

Proposed by Senate President Therese Murray, the bill would prohibit any gift including payments, entertainment, meals, travel, honoraria, subscriptions or even office supplies. Any company employee giving such a gift and any doctor, family member or employee accepting one could be punished with a $5,000 fine and two years in prison.

The distribution of drug samples would not be banned.

Also included in the bill are other measures intended to cut health care costs for the state, including adopting statewide electronic medical records by 2015, allowing patients to choose nurse practitioners instead of doctors as their primary care providers, and requiring a public review of any insurance company that increases its rates by more than 7 percent.

Currently, Massachusetts prohibits any gifts worth more than $50, or "anything of substantial value" to legislators or other public officials, but does not restrict gifts to doctors. Minnesota prohibits gifts worth more than $50 from pharmaceutical companies to doctors, while Vermont requires companies to publicly report all gifts worth more than $25. No state has even placed an outright ban on gifts to doctors.

The concept was first introduced by State Senator Mark C. Montigny, who became concerned about the high cost that buying prescription drugs imposes on the state's public health system. His attention was drawn to drug companies' practices of hiring "former beauty queens and cheerleaders" to take doctors out for expensive meals and convince them to prescribe brand-name medicines that provide no benefit over less-expensive drugs.

"You would not believe the conflict of interest here," Montigny said. "Of all the nasty manipulation that's gone on, there's no more effective group at getting more than they deserve at the expense of the taxpayer than the pharmaceutical industry."