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Unethical and criminal

(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-11-26 07:47

What exactly is the legal position on kickbacks doctors get from medicine sellers?

Whatever the answer, there should be no doubt that it is a kind of bribery. But it is rare for doctors to get penalized for getting such dirty money.

This is primarily because the specifications about the crime of taking bribes in the country's criminal law only apply to government employees. And doctors are not civil servants.

The result is that many doctors prescribe expensive medicines rather than the right and cheap ones for patients. This is one of the reasons for increasingly expensive medical bills.

The document jointly issued by the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate on Monday explicitly stipulates that such practice is a crime. This has put a lid on the controversy about this issue.

In 2006 when more than 40 doctors in a hospital in East China's Jiangxi province were found to have received kickbacks amounting to 1 million yuan, local prosecutors found no legal ground to take them to court. The incident touched off a debate on whether it was a crime for doctors to receive kickbacks.

According to the legal stipulation, this was only a violation of professional ethics, although such practice does infringe on the interests of patients. In addition, the doctors involved did abuse the power their profession gave them in order to make illegal gains not only for themselves but also for pharmaceutical firms.

The motive behind the kickbacks and the circumstances of the act match what the criminal law says about taking bribes.

That explains why the document specifies this as a criminal offence by non-governmental employees.

It is absolutely right and necessary to clarify the legal position on such illegal practice.

In our tradition, a doctor is from one of the most respected professions. The society has held doctors in such high esteem not because they make much money but because they relieve patients of their ailments and sometimes bring some back to life from the verge of death.

But some of them are losing our respect because profit, rather than the mission to cure patients, seems to have become their sole professional pursuit.

It will be unrealistic to hope that the new judicial stipulation will have an immediate effect in preventing doctors from receiving money from sellers of medicine.

Yet, the new judicial guideline is of significance in that it lays the judicial ground for prosecutors to take offenders to court and makes it possible for probes to be conducted into such practices.

(China Daily 11/26/2008 page8)