Cancer doctors profiting from drugs

Here's some interesting news and it's even in the mainstream press:

http://www.msnbc.com/news/931824.asp?0cv=CB20

Cancer doctors profiting from drugs
Oncologists’ medication markups pose ethical conflict

By Robert Bazell
NBC NEWS

June 26 — When Kelly Wilson gets treatment for lymphoma, her physician Dr. Kenneth Zeitler does not simply get paid for the services he performs. Like most cancer specialists, he also makes money from the chemotherapy drugs he prescribes for her. While the practice is perfectly legal, many critics see a potential ethical conflict.
CANCER SPECIALISTS, called oncologists, make much — and sometimes most — of their income by selling chemotherapy medications to their patients. They buy the drugs from pharmaceutical companies at wholesale prices and then sell them to their patients, sometimes at double or triple what they paid.
It is all perfectly legal. In fact, it started as an attempt to save money on health costs by moving chemotherapy treatment with intravenous cancer drugs from hospitals to doctors’ offices.
But the General Accounting Office calculates that Medicare, which covers expenses for cancer medications, now pays doctors half a billion dollars a year in drug profits.

Many critics see a potential ethical conflict: doctors could profit from prescribing too much medication or the wrong medication.

‘A FINANCIAL TEMPTATION’
“It’s not a good system where there’s a financial incentive for physicians to prescribe a particular drug,” says Robert Hayes, president of the Medicare Rights Center. “I’m not saying that doctors do that, but it’s an unseemly situation where there is the temptation, a financial temptation for a doctor.”

Zeitler, Wilson’s doctor, agrees and says he and his colleagues want the system fixed.
“We’re 100 percent in agreement that we would love to remove that taint or that appearance of impropriety from our practice,” says Zeitler.
And now Congress is trying to do just that, but not the way oncologists want.
Buried in the massive prescription drug bill now before Congress are proposals that would either dismantle the current system or substantially cut back on the amount doctors get paid for cancer medications.
However, Zeitler and others say the move by Congress goes too far. They argue it will not just reduce the amount they make from medications, but will also force them to cut back on nursing and other services they provide along with the drugs.
“This is about access to care for patients,” says Zeitler.
But despite heavy lobbying from cancer specialists, it appears Congress will cut the drug profit — a move the doctors say will hurt both them and their patients.