Grassley pushes White House on Sunshine Act regs

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) urged the White House Tuesday to finalize long-overdue regulations that would expose financial relationships between doctors and industry.

The letter to Jack Lew, President Obama's chief of staff, is Grassley's latest move to pressure the Obama administration to release final rules for the Physician Payments Sunshine Act.

"Congress passed the Sunshine Act in response to growing concerns over industry payments to physicians and their potential negative effects on patient care and efforts to restrain healthcare costs," Grassley wrote. 

"Congress designed the law so that the [payment] data would be publicly available by Sept. 30, 2013. Unfortunately, the final regulations are now more than 15 months overdue. At best, the public may miss an entire year's worth of data collection — maybe more. This is unacceptable."

Grassley is not the first to point out the delay, which has been attributed to election-year politics. AARP, the AFL-CIO and 17 other healthcare advocacy groups sent a similar letter to the Office of Management and Budget last week.

Grassley wrote the Sunshine Act with former Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), and it passed as part of Obama's signature healthcare law.

The law requires that drug, device and biologic manufacturers tell federal health officials about payments and gifts to doctors. It also orders that an online database make payment disclosures available to the public.

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