Fed up with the idea of drug companies giving kickbacks to healthcare providers, a state legislator is trying to put things into a simpler perspective.
“We license hairdressers in this state but not pharmaceutical sales reps,” said Sen. Mark Montigny (D-New Bedford) in a Joint Committee for Health Care Financing meeting at the State House yesterday.
Committee members decried what they said was an unfair influence pharmaceutical companies have on doctors’ decisions when prescribing medication, adding company representatives should be subjected to more scrutiny from state officials.
Montigny said favors and gifts given to physicians and medical institutions from pharmaceutical companies should also be banned because they might sway doctors to favor their drugs.
A panel comprised of doctors, professors and lawyers said medications should be prescribed based solely on concrete medical information and not the persuasive activities of powerful pharmaceutical companies.
The panel specifically focused on Vioxx, an anti-inflammatory drug that Merck spent $5 million on to market to healthcare professionals.
The company lost $2.5 billion when it pulled the product after 139,000 users suffered from heart problems, 30 to 40 percent of whom died as a result.
Leslie Wood, a representative for Pharmacompany, responded to Montigny and the panel on behalf of her company, saying her company’s products are created with the best interests of the patients in mind.
During Wood’s defense of her company’s ethics and practices, Sen. Richard Moore (D-Uxbridge), the committee chairman, interrupted her, criticizing the company’s failure to work with lawmakers and create a set of principled standards.
“I was shocked that the organization could not even support its own code of ethics,” Moore said.
Moore said pharmaceuticals will face a stringent, government-enforced list of ethical guidelines if they are unable to follow their own approved code of ethics.
Committee members said decreasing the influence of powerful drug companies would lead to more affordable medication.
Rep. James Marzilli (D-Arlington) said he aimed to create “consumer-driven cost control” with a new bill by expanding access to healthcare and penalizing inefficiency in the healthcare process.
“We need to take the incentives out of our system that reward hospitals even when they make mistakes,” he said. “We need to take away the co-pays of people who receive primary care . . . and deal with their problems upfront.”
Grace Moreno, director of Program and Planning for Health Care for All, testified that education is vital to establishing healthcare reform.
“We think that in educating consumers and educating the community, we will ultimately have a healthier community that will cost less to take care of,” Moreno said.
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