American Buddhist Net

...Senior officials at the two hospitals, Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals in Boston, must limit their pay for serving as outside directors to what the policy calls “a level befitting an academic role” — no more than $5,000 a day for actual work for the board.

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This is a start, and I suppose we the public must pretend to be positive about this to encourage feel-good, weak-willed doctors to move toward adopting real-world, rationally defensible ethical standards of the sort most of us are required to follow all the time. Unfortunately, these new restrictions look far too much like campaign reform for Congress; the loopholes are so large we won't even need colonoscopes to observe whose head has been lost inside of them. Let's do the math: $5,000 per day X 25 days = $125,000. Or, if you work really hard, $5,000 per day X 100 days = $500,000. Not bad for a year's work and certainly not enough to compromise even the most ethically-challenged scientist because, as they have assured us often in the past, doctors are made of sterner stuff than the rest of us and, like some members of the Supreme Court (one of which rhymes with school), they absolutely never have any trouble separating out their gain from the well-being of the lower types about whom they are making decisions. Dr. Arnold S. Relman, who I can genuinely respect, said this about the new restrictions: “I think that’s a gross conflict for an official of an academic medical center to be on the board of a pharmaceutical company. It’s happening more and more around the country. If it isn’t stopped, I think the academic institutions are going to lose the confidence of the country and the government and they will no longer deserve the tax exemption or anything else. They will be part of industry itself.” ABN