The Massachusetts Medical
Society wishes to be recorded in opposition to the above referenced legislation,
as there are existing state and federal laws in place to provide important
safeguards. Current laws in the Commonwealth limits prescribers’ meals with
drug company marketers to “modest meals.” MMS believes this current oversight
structure works well to prohibit any unreasonable meals that would not be considered
modest.
In addition, since the passage
of these laws, the federal government has enacted comprehensive legislation rendering
further adjustment to the state physician gift laws unnecessary. The Sunshine
Act requires pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers to report annually
to the Secretary of HHS certain payments or other transfers of value to
physicians and teaching hospitals. Payments are posted online for the public to
view at the CMS Open Payments website.
Massachusetts went down the
road of proscriptive laws and regulations in this arena through a strict gift
ban in 2008, and the legislature ultimately decided a few years later to revise
the approach to better balance important state oversight with the practical realities
of the current system. This Medical Society urges retention of the current
prohibition on meals not deemed to be modest and on programming in certain settings
not-conducive to good education, and discourages a return to a more proscriptive
approach that had many unintended consequences, especially on Massachusetts
physicians attended national conferences and educational events.
MMS believes that
transparency is critical to upholding trust between physicians and their
patients. We urge oversight processes, such as those already in place such as
the existing MA law and the Sunshine Act, which will provide important
safeguards while not unintentionally prohibiting physicians from attending educational
programs. This is especially important since medical education, through venues
such as national medical specialty conferences, are national productions. This
could lead to MA physicians being unable to attend certain important conferences
because of restrictive MA laws.
The MMS takes the ethics of
physicians accepting gifts from pharmaceutical company representatives very
seriously. The MMS has over seven pages of policy on the considerations that
physicians ought to keep in mind when accepting gifts from industry—not only legal
limitations, but moral guidelines as well. Given those existing laws and
guidelines, there is no need to enact this legislation.
