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Revelations of The Sunshine Act: $825 Million Spent by Pharma
A provision of the Affordable Care Act, the Sunshine Act provides for increased transparency in the healthcare realm.
Disclosure of the financial relationships between the medical industry and health care providers is a very important step toward transparency. Patients heavily rely on the recommendations of their doctors to make any kind of decision regarding their health and thus should have full awareness of payments between their doctors and the medical industry. Patients have a right to be informed about possible conflicts of interests.
A not so well-known provision of the Affordable Care Act is the Sunshine Act. The purpose of this act is to increase the transparency in the healthcare market by requiring doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device manufacturers to disclose their financial relationships. Mandated by the Sunshine Act, on September 30th, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) publicly released the first set of data, under the Open Payments title. This data includes $3.5 billion paid to over half a million doctors and teaching hospitals in the last five months of 2013.
Read the complete Brookings blog: http://bit.ly/1z4gjio
