AMA Publication Says that Boycott of Drug Company Limits Patient Choice
An article published in the June 12 issue of AMNews, a publication of the American Medical Association, acknowledges that a boycott that thousands of doctors have taken against a leading drug company limits patients' choice of drugs.
The boycott is aimed at punishing Merck because Merck-Medco, a pharmacy benefits manager associated with the drugmaker, once belonged to the Antitrust Coalition for Consumer Choice in Health Care. The article quotes an AMA official as distancing his organization from the boycott, which is being conducted by the Federation of Physicians and Dentists, a labor union, but stops short of declaring the boycott unethical.
"In a twist of irony," the AMNews article begins, "ethicists say some physicians campaigning for the Campbell bill did exactly what they accuse managed care of doing: They limited their patients' choice of drugs."
The article quotes Michael Connair, an orthopedic surgeon who serves as the Federation's vice president, as defending the boycott. Connair believes that "patients' interests are not harmed" when doctors switch their medications for political reasons and not for any medical indication. Connair did not say whether doctors tell patients that their medical decisions are politically motivated.
"But by inserting their political views into a patient care decision, did those physicians cross a line?" the AMNews article asks. "Legal issues aside, ethicists fear that the Merck incident foreshadows the new tensions unionization might create between physicians' duties to patients and their own self-interests."
Advocates of H.R. 1304 argue that doctors would never place self-interest above their patients' interests. But the Federation's boycott - along with a long line of cases in which the FTC and Justice Department have found that doctors have harmed consumers by engaging in price-fixing, collusion, boycotts and other anticompetitive behavior - shows how wrong they are.