Many physicians object to this practice. To have a “private interaction” with a patient be “subsequently sold and repackaged as marketing ammunition to use to influence my prescribing habits is distasteful to me and to many of my colleagues,” a Vermont doctor named Norman Ward has said. That state passed a law banning the sale of prescription data for marketing purposes. But IMS and its competitors joined with PhRMA, the major drugmaker consortium and lobbying group, to challenge the measure in court, and they won: the Supreme Court in 2011 overturned the law on First Amendment grounds. So
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