Sens. Grassley and Kohl have on Thursday introduced the Physician Payments Sunshine Act as promised. As not promised, a lot of our proposed amendments aren’t in there. It really isn’t traumatic, because there’s plenty of time for amendments, but here’s what they’ve done:

• They require pretty much ALL pharma and device manufacturers to report on gifts, payments, contributions, and even samples to physicians.
• At this time everything that exceeds $100 has to be reported.  I’m thinking that will get amended out in favor of a higher threshold.
• They also did not require that all the companies report to one common public Web site. Instead, at least in this version as I read it, each company reports on its own Web site. This makes it a lot less threatening because no one is going to take the time to look at all the infinite number of Web sites that will be up. I would suspect other members of Congress will want to see a common public site, but maybe that poses budgetary problems in these tight times for Congress. That said, other entities (like the Center for Science in the Public Interest) might fund a common site.
• It preempts less-demanding state laws, but allows more-demanding state laws to prevail.
• One of the reporting categories is the specialty of the physician. [For more details, see Policy and Medicine's post about it]

We should still support these Sunshine efforts. They will offset public distrust of those exceptions among professionals and companies who exercise bad judgment in their relationships with industry. We’ll work on adding some amendments that make this whole thing a bit more reasonable as it moves forward.