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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – In June, a nurse practitioner in Connecticut pleaded guilty to taking $83,000 in kickbacks from a drug company in exchange for prescribing its high-priced treatment. But you won’t find evidence of this in the federal government’s data released Tuesday on payments by drug and device companies to doctors and teaching hospitals, ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein writes.
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That’s because the federal Physician Payment Sunshine Act doesn’t require companies to publicly report payments to nurse practitioners or physician assistants, even though they’re allowed to write prescriptions in most states.
Key takeaways from Ornstein’s report:
- A ProPublica analysis shows that these two groups of providers wrote about 10 percent of the nearly 1.4 billion prescriptions in Medicare’s drug program, Part D, in 2013. For some drugs, including narcotic controlled substances, nurse practitioners and physician assistants are among the top prescribers.
- When the Sunshine Act was drafted, nurse practitioners weren’t part of the discussion. But now, with the extent of prescribing done by health professionals who aren’t physicians, they should be part of the disclosure, experts say.
- Although payments to nurse practitioners aren’t required to be reported under the law, a handful of companies did so anyway. Of the 606,000 providers who received payments in 2014, several hundred self-identified as nurse practitioners or physician assistants.
More in the full story here: http://www.propublica.org/
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