Robert Pear, who has always provided excellent coverage of public health issues for The Times, reports that the administration plans to require drug and medical equipment suppliers to report all payments – down to coffee and bagels – made to physicians and medical personnel – and make them accessible to the public via the web. We can’t imagine that there’s a plausible argument that anyone has a privacy information in this data.

What would your reaction be if your physician prescribed a particular medicine, and then found out that your doctor was taking thousands of dollars from the drug’s manufacturer? By the same token –  if you found out that your physician accepted no gifts at all from drug prescribers, might that not enhance your view of that physician’s credibility? From Robert Pear’s U.S. to Force Drug Firms to Report Money Paid to Doctors:

WASHINGTON — To head off medical conflicts of interest, the Obama administration is poised to require drug companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment.  Many researchers have found evidence that such payments can influence doctors’ treatment decisions and contribute to higher costs by encouraging the use of more expensive drugs and medical devices.

Consumer advocates and members of Congress say patients may benefit from the new standards, being issued by the government under the new health care law. Officials said the disclosures increased the likelihood that doctors would make decisions in the best interests of patients, without regard to the doctors’ financial interests.

Large numbers of doctors receive payments from drug and device companies every year — sometimes into the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars — in exchange for providing advice and giving lectures. Analyses by The New York Times and others have found that about a quarter of doctors take cash payments from drug or device makers and that nearly two-thirds accept routine gifts of food, including lunch for staff members and dinner for themselves.

The Times has found that doctors who take money from drug makers often practice medicine differently from those who do not and that they are more willing to prescribe drugs in risky and unapproved ways, such as prescribing powerful antipsychotic medicines for children.