Pain Societies Told to Disclose Financial Ties to Opioid Makers
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/915133
The US Senate Finance Committee is demanding that pain societies and advocacy groups disclose any and all payments received from opioid manufacturers.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who heads the committee, and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the minority leader, sent letters to 10 organizations asking about their financial relationships with opioid makers and other medical entities that manufacture products to treat pain.
“As Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee, we have a responsibility to ensure transparency and accountability in matters that directly affect Federal healthcare programs and tax-exempt organizations. This responsibility includes examining the extent to which pharmaceutical manufacturers fund tax-exempt organizations and how these payments may influence pain treatment practices and policy,” the senators write.
The letters were sent to the American Chronic Pain Association, the American Pain Society, the American Society for Pain Management Nursing, the American Society of Pain Educators, the Center for Practical Bioethics, the Federation of State Medical Boards, the Joint Commission, the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, the Alliance for Patient Access, and the International Association for the Study of Pain.
The Senate Finance Committee has a long history of investigating pharmaceutical manufacturers and their ties to tax-exempt entities that influence pain treatment practices and policy, the senators point out in their letter.
Sen. Wyden recently identified several individuals and tax-exempt organizations with “significant” financial ties to opioid manufacturers who have been appointed to various federal panels charged with making decisions and recommendations relating to opioid prescribing practices, the letter states.
Accountability Needed
In December 2018, Wyden launched an investigation to examine conflicts within medical advisory boards and asked the Department of Health and Human Services for information relating to “apparent conflicts” within its Pain Management Best Practices Inter-Agency Task Force (Task Force), as well as Task Force members affiliated with the US Pain Foundation and the American Academy of Pain Medicine.
“Based on information from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Open Payments database, some members on the Task Force have received tens of thousands of dollars from opioid manufacturers.
“It is imperative that Congress ensure that these organizations and their members are adequately disclosing these conflicts to the Federal government to ensure that their guidance remains objective and transparent to the medical community and to patients,” the senators write.
Federal data show that every day in the United States, about 130 people die after overdosing on opioids, including prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl.
The total economic burden of prescription opioid misuse alone tops $78 billion a year. This figure includes the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice involvement.
“These figures demonstrate that the US continues to suffer from an opioid epidemic and that taking prescription opioids for an extended period of time or in higher doses increase a patient’s risk of opioid addiction, overdose, and death,” Grassley and Widen write.
“At the same time, the relationship between opioid manufacturers and non-profit medical organizations remains robust, which calls into question their ability to make impartial recommendations to the medical community and to patients on opioid prescribing practices,” they add.
The senators acknowledge in the letter that the answer to the opioid epidemic continues to be “anything but simple. However, we believe that it is important to shed light on these financial relationships to ensure transparency and accountability in matters that affect Federal healthcare programs and the patients that participate in them,” they write.
The committee has asked that the requested information be sent by July 29, 2019.
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Filed under: General Problems
Are you nuts???? I mean that in love. But universal healthcare is NO healthcare! I don’t know if you are young, or you just haven’t experienced healthcare (hospitals, surgeries, etc.), but you will be in for a world of hurt if that happens! I’m 67 and I have had 5 surgeries and a crush injury to both legs and feet 20 years ago resulting in Complex Regional Pain Syndrome! The Government can’t handle sheet! Do you remember the couple in the UK who wanted to take their dying baby to Italy for an experimental Treatment and socialized medicine i.e. universal healthcare wouldn’t allow them to do it.
You want to wait 6 months to a year and a half to see a doctor? You won’t have a doctor you know or who knows you! Seniors will have their Medicare that they paid into with FICA stripped away from them, and while we’re at it, let’s make sure every illegal person here gets universal healthcare!!! Forget about feeding and watering the legal homeless population, cause don’t you know they’re a bunch of useless eaters?
Can’t wait till the Government leaves you with 20% of your paycheck because the other 80% went to give everyone their “basic human right” to healthcare! You are right about the greed and the rich corporations, and make a fair point about fascism. I was not saying that Hitler was a socialist (he was an evil, demonic drug addict strung out on methamphetamines and whatever else his quack doctor injected into him, but also an insane psychopath who loved to torture and kill)! I was merely pointing out that was the name his party initially took.
And I apologise for being sarcastic. My legs/feet are burning terribly and I feel like Joan of Arc at the stake. You think that universal healthcare works in the UK and in Europe? Have you ever talked to anyone who lives there? Do me a favor and Google how Bernie Sanders tried this in Vermont and what an abject failure it was!
They need to do the same information gathering with the PROP type groups, especially the Steve Rumler Hope Network who is the “fiscal sponser” of PROP
Jan Poole Well stated..I just hope we go down in a fight..I don’t understand why the dumbest always make it into politics.There are a lot of sick and twisted minds looking for power and I hope we take them out before they take us out. Just need my medication to do it
I never saw J&J rely on anything a fancy paid pain group said. They did their own homework. Naturally their ‘for profit’ entanglement made these pain groups a fat target for the AG. J&J’s only mistake was they didn’t look seriously inside of the non-profits. We got Dr. Kline, Dr. Ariens, Red Lawhern, Jonelle Elgaway and Lauren DeLuca, Dr. Tennant, Dr Ibsen and Dr. Cheek, Dr. Al Knowles, Claudia Merandi, Mary Cremer, Caylee Cresta, ME, etc., …HELLO!!???
Yes there is Steve. The government will stop at nothing until the Boomers are killed off so they won’t vote either party out of power because they spent all of our Social Security, Medicare and everything else we’ve paid FICA TAXES for! And they will save 1 TRILLION A YEAR IN HEALTHCARE!
Not until they’ve sucked all the money from Opioid manufacturers and bankrupted them will they be happy. The goal is TOTAL CONTROL OF THE PEOPLE! Their healthcare, guns, you name it. Hitler’s party was called The Democratic Socialist Party, sound familiar? The drums are beating people and your rights are being stripped from you and most are too blind to see it. Millennials have not been taught American History, and how we liberated Europe, so half of them want to live in a Socialist/Communist nation and that is what America will become— The Communist States of America!
I feel so terrible for the younger generation. They have NO IDEA what is coming and their parents and grandparents have not seen it coming either. I pray that I’m gone before we are fully flipped into communism!
We would not have this problem, if we had universal healthcare. These agencies are full of industry insiders, the corporations have taken over, while blaming socialism, or immigrants or whatever serves their purpose.
It is really clever how they deflected the blame, and mislead us all with the mass media. The same owners and propagandists at the mass media, are the ones profiting here. it is conspiracy of greed, nothing more. By the way they ranked Google to show Hitler as a “Socialist” that was now they duped the population. Hitler was a Fascist, and there are elements of Fascism plainly on view right here in the US.
Countries in Europe do not have this problem, because they all have healthcare for all. The corporations who are profiting from our misery had to come up with a counter narrative. We now live in and Oligarchy, where only the ultra wealthy corporate owners, have any say in our government. They own the media too, after all the media spouted this kind of propaganda in order to focus the blame elsewhere.
No corporate media will point the finger at the corporations, that would not be profitable.