Hipocrisy

I recently received my newsletter from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and am fuming. On almost any other day I would have read these updates and not given them a second thought, but being as he (by which of course I mean his staff) would have written a particular piece within a couple of days of voting to repeal the best parts of the STOCK act, I can't help but feel the hypocrisy dripping of these words like acid from a snarling alien.

The article in question was a boasting of Grassley's co-sponsored "Sunshine Law", written to help 'shed light' on how money gets moved around between pharmaceutical drug makers and doctors, to help ensure that citizens life altering medical decisions be swayed because of money in the pocket from the wallets of large medical companies. This is to help ensure that one citizen receives the same care that someone free of outside sway would receive. Sound familiar? The STOCK act was meant to combat "...the notion that the powerful get to set one set of rules for themselves, and another set of rules for everybody else."

My Senator, and the senator of every American reading this, allowed just that to happen.

When the bill was introduced, Grassley wanted even more officials to fall under it's doctrine. My how the times have changed. Back to my original point, here is an excerpt from why Grassely is so proud of the Sunshine Law;

"The goal of my reform effort is to help inform consumers and patients in all medical fields about financial relationships between drug makers and doctors with uniform disclosure. The public deserves a much better picture of the drug industry’s financial presence in medicine than it has today."

"The legislative reform was driven by my investigative and oversight work that exposed a number of questionable financial relationships between pharmaceutical companies and leading medical research doctors."

The following is a point made to show the seedy underbelly of what happens when people are vested in the success of a federal program. How easily you could swipe out a defense contractor, or any corporate interest that a member of congress owns some stock in with this point.

"The chairman of psychiatry at Stanford University received a federal grant to study a drug, while partially owning as much as $6 million in stock in a company that was seeking federal approval of that drug. After exposure, the federal government removed the individual from the grant."

Let us review the standards here; patients need to know what financial incentives are motivating their doctors, but knowing what financial incentives are motivating your politicians requires a written request that can take months to be responded to and will require significant details and red tape before completion. No blanket public disclosure for congress, that's none of our business apparently. And they seemed so gung-ho about this a little more then a year ago. I say this a lot when talking about my representatives, but I'm just, yet again, disappointed.