Pharmaceutical Lobby Kills California Bill to Limit Gifts by Drug Companies to Physicians

AB 2821 Dies in Assembly Health Committee as Many Democrats Lay Off Voting

By Hanh Kim Quach
Health Care Policy Coordinator
Health Access California

[Editor’s note: Update: Reconsideration of this bill was granted, meaning another vote in committee can be held and this decision reversed. In advance of the hearing on this bill, we reported on this bill in “Heavily Lobbied Bill to Protect Patients from Drug Company Direct-to-Doctor Marketing Up Today in California Assembly Health Committee”. Five Democrats, Dymally, Berg, Hancock, Jones, and Salas voted in favor. All Republicans voted against. Seven Democrats on the committee were either absent or failed to vote: De La Torre, De Leon, Bass, Hayashi, Hernandez, Lieber, and Ma. The bill needed 9 votes get pass from the committee.]

Big PhRMA today smothered AB 2821 (Feuer), which would have limited the value of gifts given to physicians to $250 (about one-tenth of what is current practice for many companies), and required them to disclose any gifts (which includes meals, subscriptions, travel, trinkets, etc) of $50 or more. To read more about the bill, and research about pharmaceutical company gifts to physicians, see CalPIRG’s report here, UCSF's research on the issue, and our previous post about the issue.

AB 2821 was a far more modest proposal than what the Journal of the American Medical Association had recommended for its community, but not this year and not this bill. It needed nine votes to pass, it got five.

Dr. Michael Steinman, a UC San Francisco medical school professor, spoke of his research, which showed gifts from pharmaceutical companies created an "expectation of reciprocity'' -- that doctors needed to somehow return the favor. His research has also shown how physicians believed their colleagues were influenced by drug company gifts

CalPIRG staff attorney Mike Russo testified that physicians are visited by drug company representatives an average of 28 times a week – or six times a day. These frequent visits, he said, harmed patient care by increasing the cost of drugs (extra marketing costs and the prescribing of higher-cost drugs when generics would be fine) and eroding the doctor-patient relationship.

Pharmaceutical companies argued -- as is their wont -- that the legislation would be too cumbersome, expensive, yada yada.... The bottom line is, if this type of marketing didn't work, they wouldn't dedicate $19 billion annually to push their drugs to the fore.

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