The amount of data that will be generated by the act will be enormous. Consider the fact that there are more than 650,000 practicing physicians. Given the low threshold for reporting, physicians receiving $101 and those who are paid $100,000 will be listed. We may end up with thousands of pages of data, the sheer volume of which will make it challenging for visitors to the website to parse the numbers. The outcome might resemble what we see in other instances of disclosure. Have you ever fully read the paperwork explaining your rights as a credit card holder, or as the owner of a home mortgage? Disclosure does not always lead to clarity.
Before you feel too bad about the impact of the Sunshine Act on your lives, consider our friends and colleagues who work at the NIH. The Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act was recently enacted. It was intended to prevent insider trading by members of Congress, but it casts a wide net, covering 28,000 senior staff members in the executive branch, including about 600 employees of the NIH. Though they are already held to stringent limits on owning drug company stocks, they must now list all personal (and spousal) financial transactions, not just those related to healthcare industries, within 45 days. All this data will be available (you guessed it) on a publicly available website.
So what’s the weather going to be like in 2013? With all this anticipated sunshine, you might want to pack sunglasses and suntan lotion. But I would throw in an umbrella. And a raincoat. Just to be sure.
Dr. Helfgott is physician editor of The Rheumatologist and associate professor of medicine in the division of rheumatology, immunology, and allergy at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
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