Last month the Bush administration proposed health care legislation that will allow pharmaceutical companies to exploit the confidential medical records of U.S. citizens.
Drug companies undoubtedly will use this information to violate basic rights of privacy.
The legislation is part of the Standards for Privacy of Individually Identifiable Health Information, a package of proposals that has been repeatedly revised for the past three years.
Bush's proposed changes regarding pharmaceutical marketing practices are intolerable and show a complete lack of sensitivity toward patient privacy, giving pharmaceutical companies and their greedy cohorts the green light to peruse the most personal information of any individual.
Experts in health care policy decry the new legislation as harmful to patient rights.
"The proposed marketing regulations are a real hand-off to the pharmaceutical companies," Health Policy Analyst Carolyn Engelhard said. "They allow communication and information about care coordination or disease management programs to go forward without patient consent or approval."
If passed, the regulations will permit drug companies to target patients who currently receive treatment for an illness or disease.
"Almost everything that is done by pharmaceutical companies can be done under the definition of disease management programs or care coordination information," Engelhard added.
Imagine a patient with a chronic medical condition who has an extensive medical history and works daily to manage his or her condition.
Under the proposed regulation there is nothing that stops a pharmaceutical company from contacting this patient under the guise of "disease management."
Although it may seem the drug companies just want to help, make no mistake - they only are concerned with marketing their products.
The Food and Drug Administration approved direct-to-consumer marketing in 1997, allowing pharmaceutical companies to name both the drug and the illness it treated in the same advertisement.
Such advertising dramatically increases health care costs and undermines the implicit trust in relationships between doctors and their patients. Furthermore, health care costs rise when patients request the drugs and treatments advertised in magazines and on television.
Many patients become critical and untrusting of their doctors when they fail to prescribe the latest health care products. This propagates a vicious cycle in which doctors succumb to patient demands.
New health products usually are more expensive because the patents that protect them from competition have not expired.
Perhaps even more importantly, new medications are not necessarily more effective than older generic drugs. In many cases new drugs are more effective but have serious side effects. Prescribing powerful drugs with serious side effects to patients with mild forms of an illness or disease is impractical and costly.
It is important patients remain informed of advances in medicine, but it is equally important they continue to see their doctor and discuss the pros and cons of new drugs.
Patients should be able to see what is out there but doctors should influence decision making, not pharmaceutical advertising executives.
The proposed changes in the marketing practices of pharmaceutical companies will make it even easier for these entities to exploit consumers.
Patients will be bombarded with daily e-mails or phone calls informing them of new drugs or new clinical trials that might not even help treat their disease.
This should not be allowed. The insurers, pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies will exploit the concerns of ill Americans in order to make a quick buck.
Pharmaceutical companies spent $2.5 billion on advertising in 2000, a seven-fold increase from 1996. The majority of spending went to television ads peddling high-profile non-generic medicines.
What will be the impact of personal direct-to-consumer e-mail advertisements or phone calls? It is not hard to imagine how these practices will increase patients' distrust of health care providers as well as continue to increase health care costs.
The Bush administration can alleviate such problems by making a strong commitment to patients and protecting their privacy.
Until Bush restricts access to individual medical records to physicians and other health professionals, he makes it clear that pharmaceutical companies come before the privacy of U.S. citizens.
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