Twenty groups, including OMB Watch, have sent a letter calling on Congress to include accountability and transparency provisions in any health care reform legislation. Specifically, the groups focused on federal advisory committees – panels that will provide critical advice on health care issues if legislation is passed. The groups represent a wide variety of public interest issues.

Current bills under consideration would create several new advisory committees. Although most of these committees would be subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act, that law is too weak to provide the public with adequate opportunities to monitor and participate in the health care policy debate once it moves out of Congress and into federal agencies.

The letter, sent Nov. 3 to House and Senate leadership and key lawmakers crafting reform legislation, underscores the important role these advisory committees will play and calls for specific transparency and accountability provisions to be included in legislation:

Because these advisory panels will play major roles on issues ranging from immunization practices and clinical research to health care financing and the development of the health care labor force, we urge you to ensure that members of these panels perform their duties with full transparency and free of financial conflicts of interest.

The American public will be ill-served if these advisory committees operate behind closed doors and are influenced by members with financial ties to special interests with a stake in their deliberations.

At a minimum, all advisory panels created by any final health care law should:

• Require that all information about each advisory panel, including a full audio or video record of each panel meeting, is accessible via the Internet;
• Actively seek out advisory panel members without conflicts of interest;
• Assess financial conflicts of interest, and strive to name only non-conflicted experts to advisory committees;
• When conflicts are unavoidable, require that any waivers given to a conflicted advisory board member and the reasons for granting the waiver are part of the public record; and,
• Specifically require disclosure of the names and backgrounds of each member, and whether they are serving as experts or to represent particular constituencies. 

To read the entire letter, click here.

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