Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18592

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Gershon L
Empty Tables: Restaurants feel sting of medical gift ban
Worcester Business Journal Online 2010 Aug 16
http://www.wbjournal.com/news47067.html

Full text:

Two years ago, when the state passed a law preventing doctors and other medical professionals from receiving many types of perks from the makers of drugs and medical devices, backers celebrated Massachusetts taking the lead on an ethical issue.
So, when the state House of Representa-tives voted to reverse the law this year, those supporters fought back, and in the frantic final hours of the legislative session, the proposed reversal ended up disappearing in a puff of conference committee smoke.
Unseen Consequences
The law went into effect on July 1, 2009. To supporters, the past year has not given them enough time to be able to judge its effects with confidence, but it stands to reason that it has probably reduced medical costs. On the other side, though, opponents of the ban, including a number of restaurant owners in Central Massachusetts, say they’ve already seen clear results – all of them negative.
When chef Bill Brady opened his restaurant, Sonoma, in Princeton in 1996, he found an unexpected market with pharmaceutical companies. The location was perfect for company reps to set up meetings with several doctors from the Worcester, Fitchburg/Leominster and Gardner/Athol areas.
“We kind of turned into, believe it or not, a central place to meet,” Brady said.
Among the provisions of the gift ban is one that entirely prevents industry representatives from taking doctors out to eat, although they are permitted to bring food into a doctor’s office for a meeting.
The upshot, Brady said, was a loss of 20 percent of his mid-week business. Comparing the money he made from the medical mini-conferences before and after the gift ban, Brady said he saw $80,000 disappear.
Meanwhile, at the Beechwood Hotel in Worcester, General Manager Mark Waxler did a similar calculation and found that the hotel lost $130,000 to $140,000, though he said that’s just a good guess since some business was done under the name of a meeting planner rather than the medical company involved.
Supporters of the ban don’t disagree that some restaurants may have hurt, but they say the restaurant industry in general hasn’t particularly suffered. Georgia Maheras, manager of the Massachusetts Prescription Reform Coalition, a group formed by health reform organization Health Care For All, the restaurant business in Massachusetts has declined at a rate similar to the rest of the recession-plagued country.
And, according to supporters of the ban, any reduction in business from medical industries isn’t just the result of government action. Major hospitals, including Worcester’s UMass Memorial Medical Center, have set limits of their own that could lead to many of the same consequences.
“Our policy is actually more stringent than the state’s,” said Stephen E. Tosi, chief medical officer at UMass Memorial.
Tosi said the medical community has been moving toward a consensus that gifts from the medical industries are a problem at least since the 2006 publication of a much-discussed article on the subject in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Tighter regulations have been appearing ever since, starting with large teaching hospitals like UMass; Tosi said that will probably continue, perhaps even with national legislation that would render state laws moot.
Dinner Talks
But Paul Wetzel, who manages Norwell-based state medical associations for orthopedic surgeons and dermatologists, said his members are unhappy with the law. With the elimination of dinners where multiple doctors can have a dialog with a particular drug manufacturer, he said, they have to spend more time traveling to national or statewide meetings to get the information they need.
Tosi said policies like UMass Memorial’s, or the state law, shouldn’t prevent a dialogue with industry representatives.
“It’s perfectly fine for me to ask a medical sales rep to come to my office,” he said.
Peter Christie, president and CEO of the Southborough-based Massachusetts Restaurant Association, said he’s met doctors who have been embarrassed at conferences to have to pay for their breakfast or go hungry while their colleagues from other states grab a pharmaceutical-sponsored bagel with impunity.
“These are noble people,” Christie said. “The thought that they’re out three hours so that they can get a free steak dinner is absurd.”
But Maheras said gift supporters don’t doubt the good intentions of doctors.
“Recognizing that doctors are professionals, social science research has said repeatedly that [it’s part of] the human condition – when you’re given a gift you want to reciprocate,” she said. “It’s just a fact of being a human.” And she said information from pharmaceutical and medical device companies bears this out, suggesting that industry gets a 300- to 500-percent return on the investments it makes marketing to doctors and hospitals.