How I Would Improve Ethics in Health Care

One of the things that seems to be getting lost in health care debates is the matter of ethics. This is a problem of far more concern than who pays the insurance bills or what country medicines come from. Unethical practices directly jeopardize the health of patients and compromise the standards of doctors.

A major ethical problem in medicine today is the fact that drug companies and medical equipment manufacturers are able to, in a roundabout way, bribe doctors to use their products. Of course, this usually doesn’t take the form of a lunchbag full of money. Instead, they use legal methods to deliver their favors. You may have heard of “medical conferences” that doctors attend. These are typically funded by manufacturers of expensive drugs, medical equipment, and other such companies. Favored doctors are not only given free passes to these “conferences,” but free room and board as well. “What’s wrong with that,” you may ask. What’s wrong with it is the fact that these events usually take place in highly popular resort locations like Hawaii or Paris. It amounts a bribe of a free resort vacation. Doctors who accept the free passes are then beholden to the company that provided them, and are more likely to prescribe that company’s drugs or use their equipment.

Many attempts have been made to legislate against kickbacks to doctors. Blatant discounts, cash-back offers, and other such bribes are out. However, with each new piece of ethics legislation along these lines, medical companies find a new way to buy the favor of doctors. New legislation needs to be made that addresses the free vacation-conference loophole. This legislation also needs to look ahead, and use wording that will ban other such variants without the need to rewrite the laws every time someone comes up with a new idea for a freebie.

The other big ethics problem in health care today goes under the umbrella of three simple letters: FDA. The Food and Drug Administration is run by those who have close personal connections with drug makers. It amounts to having the foxes not only in the hen house, but in charge of it. Small companies that dare to make drugs that compete with Big Pharma can look forward to a much longer, more expensive, and more arduous approval process than would be faced by products coming from one of the big companies. On the other hand, if a big company puts out a drug, it is likely to breeze to approval unless trial subjects are dropping dead right in the testing center.

In recent years, there have been several massive drug recalls and class-action lawsuits due to the lethal results of FDA-approved drugs. How did these drugs get through in the first place? It is likely because of the rampant cronyism between the FDA’s officials and the drug companies.

Changing the laws so that FDA officials cannot have any current or recent ties to drug companies or medical equipment manufacturers would be a good start to cleaning up the agency’s act. These laws need to be worded so that “resigning” a medical-company job a few months or a year before will not qualify someone for an FDA appointment. Another thing that needs to be banned is the common ploy of having one half of a spousal team at the FDA while the other half is still working at some drug or medical-device corporation. The results of such legislation would almost surely be an improvement in the process of getting the right drugs to market and keeping the dangerous ones off of it.

These are just a couple of the ways I would improve ethics in the health care industry. There are surely several more reforms that could be made. With this start, however, I think there would be a great improvement in the actual results of health care as well as cost savings.