On June 28, the Supreme Court made its momentous decision upholding the Affordable Care Act, a major win in the effort to ensure that all Americans can go to a doctor when they get sick and receive high-quality, affordable care. The ruling paved the way for the law to be fully implemented to benefit the American people. It means that insurance companies can no longer deny care to people when they get sick or if they have a pre-existing condition, benefit expansions such as closing the Medicare prescription drug “donut hole” for seniors and people with disabilities are secure, and new coverage programs for those without insurance can be implemented.

And the decision means many other innovations and consumer protections in the ACA will go forward, including the Physician Payment Sunshine provisions, which Community Catalyst, the Pew Prescription Project and others have championed for many years. The Sunshine provisions mandate that all payments to physicians and teaching hospitals made by makers of drugs, medical devices and biological products be reported to the government, and then disclosed to the public. This broad transparency program is intended to improve quality of care by reducing the incidence of fraudulent or unethical promotions to prescribers and the resulting wasteful costs to patients and public programs.

Fraudulent and highly unethical industry payments to medical professionals have led to lawsuits against virtually every major drug and device company. Just this month, a new record-breaking settlement of $3 billion with Glaxo-Smith-Kline revealed that GSK salespeople paid or compensated doctors through illegal kickbacks related to seven different drugs: Avandia, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Imitrex, Lotronex, Flovent and Valtrex.

“GSK’s sales force bribed physicians to prescribe GSK products using every imaginable form of high priced entertainment, from Hawaiian vacations to paying doctors millions of dollars to go on speaking tours to a European pheasant hunt to tickets to Madonna concerts, and this is just to name a few,” said Carmen M. Ortiz, U.S. Attorney in Massachusetts.

This is fresh on the heels of last month’s shocking revelations about Abbott’s payments to professionals at nursing homes to promote the over-use of Depakote to treat the elderly.

Congress included the Sunshine provisions in the ACA out of concern for such practices and their impact on patient care and medical professionalism. Now industry will be required to report all payments made to doctors and teaching hospitals on a public website. This will allow patients, researchers, Medicare, Medicaid, private health plans, medical schools and academic medical centers can continually monitor these financial exchanges and evaluate whether they could be leading to bias in prescribing or medical education.

Now that the Sunshine provisions are clearly the law of the land, the Obama administration should finalize the regulations promptly so that industry reporting and public disclosure can proceed.

 — Marcia Hams, Director, Prescription Access and Quality