LewRockwell In a very thorough and revealing analysis of statistical industry payment data, ProPublica disclosed that more than 2,500 physicians have received at least half a million dollars apiece from drugmakers and medical device companies in the past five years alone, while more than 700 of those doctors received at least $1 million, and that doesn’t include money for research or royalties from inventions.
In their article, the authors note that their previous analysis in 2013, which found out that 1 doctor had made $1 million and 21 doctors had made over $500,000 for the same reasons, was expected to be a wake-up call for more effective scrutiny, oversight, and challenges to these payments. Instead, these types of payments have become much more commonplace.
To identify the latest pharma millionaires and other spending trends, ProPublica analyzed more than 56 million payments made from 2014 to 2018 — the first five full years of the federal Open Payments initiative, which requires companies to publicly disclose the payments as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.
Some academics and physicians predicted that the exposure might cause companies to rethink making payments and doctors to rethink taking them. A flurry of studies matched the payment data with doctors’ prescribing choices and found links between the payments and the products doctors chose.
But ProPublica’s new analysis shows that the public reporting has not dampened the enthusiasm of the drug and medical device industry for having doctors deliver paid dinner talks and sponsored speeches or paying them to consult on products.
In fact, there has been almost no change in how much the industry is spending. Each year from 2014 to 2018, drug and medical device companies spent between $2.1 billion and $2.2 billion paying doctors for speaking and consulting, as well as on meals, travel and gifts for them.
It turns out, even if this information needs to be disclosed, even if many studies found links between the payments and the products doctors chose to foist upon their patients, there doesn’t seem to be any rush to curtail or prevent such an arrangement between doctors and the industry. Shouldn’t doctors’ recommendations to their patients and to other doctors be based solely on their own research and conscience, and not on the potential for a lavish secondary income?
One would think so. But that isn’t the current sentiment. There seems to be a fairly universal acceptance among doctors in the U.S. of the idea of receiving remuneration from industry to speak favorably about their products. As the latest analysis points out,
Over the course of five years, 1 million doctors, dentists, optometrists, chiropractors and podiatrists received at least one payment, most often a meal, from a company. Of those practitioners, more than 323,000 received at least one payment every year. About 240,000 received a payment in only one year. And the rest received payments in more than one year but in fewer than five.
For context, there are about 1.1 million doctors in the United States.