In one year, they gave away $3.49 billion. One lucky person got a $43.9 million windfall.
Sound like the lottery?
Nope. That’s how much money Big Pharma gave to doctors in one year.1
What do the doctors do in return? Prescribe pricey brand-name drugs so pharmaceutical companies can rack up huge profits.2
Greedy pharmaceutical companies already enjoy a $300 billion global market. Their profit margins are a robust 30%. But they aren’t satisfied.
Paying off doctors is a major part of Big Pharma’s drug marketing. The drug companies don’t want doctors prescribing less expensive generics. So they entice them to prescribe their higher-priced brand names. And they do it with cash and freebies.
These payments include speaking fees, consulting fees, travel, meals, and gifts.3
Big Pharma and doctors have long refuted charges of influence peddling. But a new analysis of drug company payments shreds this duplicitous argument. The study was done by ProPublica, an independent, non-profit organization.
Find out if Your Doctor Gets Drug Company Payments
Their exhaustive research analyzed Medicare data from 2014. They found that doctors who receive payments from the medical industry prescribe brand-name drugs at a 50% higher rate than their non-paid colleagues. And the more cash they receive, the more brand-name medications they prescribe.4
Generic drugs offer far lower profits than brand names.
The study analyzed the prescribing habits of doctors across five specialties. They included family medicine, internal medicine, cardiology, psychiatry, and ophthalmology.
It found drug company payments to doctors are rampant. About three-quarters of the doctors in the U.S. receive at least one payment a year from a drug company.
Cardiologists pulled the most drug company payments. Nearly 9 in 10 who wrote at least 1,000 prescriptions through Medicare received money from a drug or device company in 2014.
One family practice doctor landed $43.9 million from drug companies in 2014.5 Another doctor in pediatric critical care got $28.7 million.
To be fair, some of the money is for legitimate services. Some doctors receive royalties from devices they have designed.
But there is no doubt something is rotten in Big Pharma Land.
Big Pharma Caught Cheating
Drug companies have been caught cheating in the past. They have paid $7 billion in fines and lawsuit settlement fees for blatantly paying doctors to prescribe their products. In some cases, doctors were encouraged to prescribe expensive drugs when the patient didn’t need any medication at all.
Want to find out whether your doctor has been raking in Big Pharma cash? It’s easy. Go to the ProPublica Dollars for Docs website by clicking here.
Type in your doctor’s name, city, state, and zip code. Hit “Search.” And you will see how much money he or she has been paid.
Here’s another thing you should know about Big Pharma…
The decades’ worth of study results on this natural herb extract are so promising that they are trying to turn it into a drug.
When they do, they’ll try to sell it to you for hundreds of dollars. And heaven knows what kind of side effects it’ll come with. You can get the safer, natural version now… For just pennies a day.
All the details are revealed right here.
In Good Health,
Angela Salerno
Publisher, INH Health Watch
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References:
1https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/
2http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/03/17/470679452/drug-company-payments-mirror-doctors-brand-name-prescribing
3https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/company/genentech-inc
4http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/03/17/470679452/drug-company-payments-mirror-doctors-brand-name-prescribing
5https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/doctors/pid/281659