Posted by Jacob Goldstein

Vermont is one of the only states in the nation that requires drug makers to report their payments to doctors and other health care providers. But the state's law has a provision (or loophole, depending on your point of view) that allows companies to flag their payments as "trade secrets" that the state can't disclose to the public.

The watchdog group Public Citizen sued to get access to the hidden payments and wound up getting a bunch of details previously unseen by the public. (The state includes the trade secret payments in the aggregate data it publishes, but doesn't release the details.) The newly available figures are reported in this week's JAMA.

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