Study: Drug company payments to doctors often exceed limits

CHICAGO (AP) -- Want to know if your doctor accepts money and gifts from drug companies? Chances are it will be pretty tough to find out, a study of disclosure laws in two pioneering states suggests.
Minnesota and Vermont were the first two states to enact laws designed to shed light on the practice, but getting key information required a lawsuit in Vermont and photocopying individual disclosure forms in Minnesota, the researchers said.
Also, loopholes allow drug companies to hide millions of dollars in payments and make it difficult to know who's receiving them, according to the report.
The researchers said many doctors accepted amounts exceeding recommended limits, but that it was hard to sort out which payments were inappropriate.
The issue is important to consumers because doctors may end up recommending drugs because of industry influence, not patients' best interests, said lead author Dr. Joseph Ross, a researcher at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
"The hoops that we had to jump through just to get the data in each state is enough to show these laws really aren't working," Ross said.
Most payments studied were related to education, research, meals and personal visits with doctors to promote new drugs, the researchers said. But reasons for many payments were not specified, sometimes because companies declared them trade secrets.
The results highlight the need for better enforcement of existing laws, and should help others craft better ones elsewhere, the authors said.
Minnesota's law dates to 1993; Vermont's was enacted in 2001. Defenders say it's not surprising to find imperfections in these early efforts and that improvements in both states' laws are under way.
California, the District of Columbia, Maine and West Virginia also have disclosure laws, and similar legislation was proposed last year in 11 other states, the researchers said. Ross said it's unclear whether similar problems would be found elsewhere.
The study appears in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.
Drug companies' efforts to influence doctors are pervasive. An article in the journal last year said about 90 percent of the industry's roughly 21 billion annual marketing budget is spent on doctors.
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