News-Record.com

Thursday's No. 2 editorial..

State lawmakers have done exactly what they needed to do with a nonsensical rule that levied taxes on the free drug samples given by doctors to their patients. They flushed it.

A provision tucked into a property tax bill passed last week by the General Assembly overrides a ruling that penalizes doctors who help patients stretch health care dollars by dispensing the free samples.

Gov. Mike Easley signed the bill into law on Wednesday. Good for him and the rest of us.
Otherwise, doctors would have to pay property taxes on the free pharmaceuticals they give to their patients. This whole notion, of course, bordered on absurdity from the very start. But it was the law.

The state Department of Revenue in 2006 ruled that the free samples were “office supplies” rather than inventory because they were not for sale. That made them personal property, ergo, taxable.

Feeling compelled to obey the ruling, Guilford County Tax Director Francis Kinlaw in June had his department bill Greensboro’s Eagle Physicians and Associates for back taxes after auditors discovered the firm’s doctors didn’t list free drug samples on their tax returns from 2003 to 2007.

The resulting tsunami of outrage spilled from the medical community into the general public. The county was doing what to doctors and their patients?

Kinlaw subsequently wrote a News & Record op-ed to explain his position — that he merely was doing as he was instructed by the state.

Now the state presumably has fixed this problem and we’ll all feel better in the morning, now that the bill officially has become law.

To be sure, dispensing free drug samples is not a purely altruistic gesture. It helps drug companies market lucrative medications.

But it also performs a greater good for cash-strapped patients in an era of spiraling health costs. The General Assembly made a healthy choice and the governor has as well.