Roy Poses, M.D., in his Web site Health Care Renewal, discusses the conflicts of interest between some so-called patient-advocacy groups and pharmaceutical, biotech and medical-device companies. He quotes, for example, one report on the situation:
“In the context of organization-industry relations, concerns have been raised that industry-supported patient-advocacy organizations have spoken out for access to drugs with questionable therapeutic benefit and remained silent on policy proposals, such as drug-pricing reforms, that might benefit their constituents.”
Dr. Poses comments:
“Such conflicts of interest clearly raise the risk that the organizations may be influenced to put their financial sponsors’ interests ahead of those of patients and the public. However, the articles discussed {in Dr. Poses’s Web site} were not designed to discover how often such conflicts actually lead to abuse of these organizations’ power. Such abuse could be health care corruption, since corruption is defined by Transparency International as abuse of entrusted power for private gain.”
To read Dr. Poses’s piece, please hit this link.
