Sen. Chuck Grassley co-authored the Physician Payments Sunshine Act, later enacted, after his oversight and news stories uncovered significant payments from the prescription drug and medical device industry to doctors that had not been disclosed. Rather than prohibit such payments, which in many cases might benefit patients as in through research, the law required disclosure. The information is tracked through the Open Payments database, which today posted new data showing that the industry gave payments to doctors of $8.18 billion covering 11.96 million records for 2016. Between 2013, when the database went live, through 2016, industry payments totaled $24.94 billion, covering 40.77 million records. Grassley is the lead co-sponsor of pending bipartisan legislation to apply the disclosure requirements to nurse practitioners and physician assistants. Grassley made the following comment on the latest data.
“There have been attempts to get rid of the sunshine requirements. The numbers show why we ought to have sunshine. A patient who’s interested should be able to search for her doctor and see whether there are payments that she’d like to consider. Researchers and reporters are able to mine the data for patterns and trends. Transparency adds value just about wherever it’s applied. I’ve been asked whether it’s possible to measure the success of the sunshine database. We know that doctors continue to receive the research payments they use for patient benefit, just as they did before sunshine. There’s no way to know how many questionable payments were never made because someone didn’t want to disclose them. If sunshine has deterred questionable payments while letting doctors continue to act for patient benefit, then it’s a success.”
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