Seeking Transparency on Sunshine Act

Yesterday Senators Kohl and Grassley submitted a letter to CMS seeking information on the implementation of the Sunshine Act – the legislation passed and signed into law that would put into place a system for public reporting of the financial transactions between medical product manufacturers and medical providers.  Many will recall that last fall, CMS missed the deadline for outlining its plans for how it would collect and report on financial transaction data.  At the time that prompted a letter from Senator Grassley inquiring when the agency would get around to doing so.  Yesterday, another letter went out.
“We are disappointed that regulations implementing the Sunshine Act were not complete by the statutory deadline of October 1, 2011.  We request that the final rule on implementation be released no later than June of this year so that partial data collection for 2012 can commence.”
In addition, there was some specific direction.  In the letter they urge that CMS define very specific categories for payments and urged a removal of a catchall “other” category that could serve to obscure the nature of some transactions.  In addition, the Senators took issue with the proposed yearly schedule for correcting mis-reporting to the public site stating rather that errors should be corrected as the error becomes known.

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