4 Reasons Why You Should Care About the Sunshine Act
It is definitely a disconcerting thought when you think about whether or not your physicians really care about you and your general health or if their relationship with pharmaceuticals companies is more important. The Sunshine Act requires greater transparency between these sorts of relationships, and therefore it requires that all monetary transactions, including things like dinners and gifts given by major pharmaceutical companies to individual physicians and doctors, are recorded and made easily available for public viewing.
The main section of the Sunshine Act, which is a broad piece of legislation relating to the transparency of many branches of government, is called the Physician Payment Sunshine Act, and for many this act seems to be antidote for major pharmaceutical influence over your doctors. It is relatively well considered that increased transparency means that your physicians are to be trusted to take your actual welfare into more consideration instead of relying on the prescription and distribution of certain pharmaceutical company’s products.
Listed below are a couple more reasons why you should really care about the Sunshine Act.
– Instead of being opposed or violated by the Sunshine Act, major pharmaceutical companies and most of the industry has been eager to post payments and participate in many of the provisions of the act; however, many groups consider that the open disclosure between the pharmaceutical companies and their recipients does not actually discourage practices that include physicians over-prescribing certain products that benefits the company instead of the patient. Some studies even show that the Sunshine Act had little effect on physicians prescribing expensive and commonly over-prescribed medicines.
– If physicians partially own shares or part-ownership of pharmaceutical companies they will still be required to document monetary transfers, even if those physicians are not part of the manufacturing process they will still be required to follow all of the guidelines that the Physician Payment Sunshine Act states.
– In addition to the monetary payments that need to be recorded, the information regarding the prescribed drug needs to be recorded in detail as well; this includes the name of the drug and/or device. Even in cases where a company representative takes a physician out for dinner and the topic of a certain drug comes up, the information about this drug needs to be recorded along with the dinner.
– Manufacturer and pharmaceutical companies also need to state the reasons for monetary transactions made to physicians and education facilities. Every payment listed in the Sunshine Act’s provisions needs to be categorized that would explain the specific reasoning for these payments. This will help aid in the transparency process by trying to expose the intentions behind an industry representative and physician relationship.
The Physician Payment Sunshine Act is a long and difficult piece of legislation, and since it is rather new and has yet to produce its first official report, there is much speculation on whether or not this will make a difference in the over-prescription of certain drugs and the influence of health industry upon physicians to prescribe certain drugs. Nonetheless, this measure will give people easy access to get a better idea about how their physicians are related to the companies that produce their medical devices and products.
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