Vermont’s attorney general has had enough of “direct cash payments to doctors and nurses and others in Vermont who are prescribing the [cash paying] companies’ drugs.”
The AG is “is shocked that the industry spends so much money on marketing in a state of 600,000 residents… ‘If we’re seeing millions of dollars in cash payments here, then what happens in New York State or California or Florida?’ he said. ‘We’re talking about incredibly large amounts of money.'”
All so your four-year-old can get the most expensive anti-psychotic.
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Ken Libertoff, who works for a Vermont mental health advocacy group, says it’s time to “shine sunlight on an old Vermont basement.”
A proposed law would, among other things, make the names of practitioners accepting major goodies from drug firms public.
The president of the Vermont Senate extends the basement metaphor: “I think we will look back at this era of drugging our kids as a dark moment in medical treatment.”
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In a comment Eliot Spitzer should have thought of, a Vermont psychiatrist who gets money from pharma to prescribe the latest pills says:
It’s a financial interaction between two parties. … And frankly, I don’t think it is anyone else’s business.