In a crucial move, which has been described as the most stringent state effort to regulate the marketing of medical products to doctors, the Vermont legislature has passed a law requiring drug and device makers to publicly disclose all money given to physicians and other health care providers, naming names and listing dollar amounts.
As per the information available, the Vermont Legislature has passed legislation (S 48) that bans nearly all gifts from pharmaceutical and medical device companies to health care providers, administrators and facilities in the state.
According to a report filed by The New York Times, the law is scheduled to take effect on July 1.
Gov. Jim Douglas is expected to sign the law by early next month. Several state medical groups -- including the Vermont Association for Mental Health and the Vermont Medical Society -- have indicated support for the legislation.
In practice, the new law would let Vermonters learn each year which doctors have been paid, and how much, by the makers of the brand-name drugs for which they wrote prescriptions — or how much money surgeons have received from the makers of products like stents, pacemakers and artificial knees.
The law is also the first one to ban all free meals. The law also closes a loophole in previous regulations that had allowed companies to keep specific expenses private by claiming them as trade secrets. The required disclosures, though, do not include payments for clinical research on products under review by the Food and Drug Administration.
In a recent report, the Vermont Office of the Attorney General said that medical product makers spent about $2.9 million on promotional efforts to the state's health care providers in fiscal year 2008 and that nearly half of the state's 4,573 licensed providers had received some type of incentive from drugmakers in the same year. The report, which was developed prior to passage of the new legislation, offers only aggregate data, as 83% of the manufacturer-declared payments were deemed to be trade secrets, according to the local media.
