Last week, the American College of Physicians (ACP), a 129,000-member group of internal medicine physicians, and second-largest doctors group in the US, called for increased FDA authority and  funding to help protect  consumers from the risks of newly-app

Merck has announced it will begin publishing payments it makes to doctors in the fourth quarter of 2009, the Financial Times reports today. The announcement makes specific the drug giant's Sept. 2008 promise to begin to publish speaking payments to doctor

The FDA has announced it will hear public comment on the use of social media to advertise prescription drugs and medical devices. There is a hearing scheduled for Nov. 12 and 13 of this year, and the docket is open for public comment through Feb. 2010. Ou

With no commitments of Republican support, Chairman Baucus can only afford to lose two Democratic votes and still get a bill out of committee.  Sen. Rockefeller (D-WV) has already committed publicly to opposing the bill in its current form, and Sen. Menen

Perfect Timing On the very day that Senator Baucus finally released a proposal for consideration by the Senate Finance Committee, community and faith leaders came together in Washington to deliver an important message: getting affordability right is the

In a red-letter week for the Physician Payments Sunshine Act (which appeared in the Senate Finance Chairman’s Mark of health reform yesterday), the transparency bill got another nod from the editors of Nature, who endorsed the measure as part of a necessa

Drug and medical device companies would have to report most payments to doctors above $10, under a version of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act included in the Senate health reform bill introduced this morning. The Chairman’s Mark, the health reform

A study released this week in the New England journal of Medicine found that a large majority of physicians support the expansion of publicly-backed health insurance programs. The survey, funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, polled over 5000 rand

A paper in the Archives of Ophthalmology published yesterday suggests that something has to change about the way the profession interacts with the pharmaceutical industry. Since a symposium on physician–industry relations in May 2008,  a group of authors