Is Your Doctor Paid Off With Big Pharma Spending?
Mar 31st, 2012 | By Sarah R. | Category: Big Pharma and the FDA, Health, Top Headline | Print This Article
Lost in the healthcare debate is the serious problem of Big Pharma spending on marketing, advertising, and physician courting. While legislators and the public argue of the future of ObamaCare, pharmaceutical firms are putting down serious cash to ensure their drugs stay in your life no matter what.
It’s no longer about your good health, preventing pain, or extending life. Large pharmaceutical companies around the world are spending more on marketing and advertising than they do on research and development, according to York University studies of pharmaceutical promotion. The net result is that what happens to you in the doctor’s office is increasingly driven by Big Pharma marketing initiatives.
Molding Your Doctor
Doctors hotly deny that pharmaceutical companies influence their behavior, but that’s not what the numbers say. For every $1 a pharmaceutical company spends promoting its drugs with physicians, the return on investment (ROI) averages $1.72 in prescription dollars – but it can shoot as high as $10 for every $1 spent when you look at the most aggressively marketed drugs.
It’s not just direct physician spending (speakers fees, gifts from pharmaceutical reps) that counts. If the pharmaceutical company sponsors a medical conference or continuing education event, each $1 spent on the event turns into $3.56 in drug sales. Your doctor goes hoping to learn something new and comes back with a new mindset instead.
What if your doctor tries to fight that? Many doctors have a policy of not dealing with pharmaceutical representatives, and they don’t go to conferences. So they’re immune from Big Pharma influences, right? Wrong, wrong, wrong!
All doctors read some kind of medical journal, specialty surgical publication, or physician-specific magazine. Big Pharma loves to advertise in these publications, because for each $1 spent advertising in a medical journal or publication, the ROI is a stunning $5 in drug sales.
So much for their denials! Doctors may think they’re making their own decisions, but the influence of Big Pharma is everywhere in the medical industry. From direct contact to filling glossy medical magazines with advertising, pharmaceutical companies are spending an average of $61,000 per physician, per year to move their drugs.
Working the System
This heavy spending by Big Pharma isn’t likely to stop since the ROIs are so good. Pharmaceutical companies are even willing to pay big fines to keep behaving as they please in the marketplace. Over the last two decades, pharmaceutical firms have paid the government $19.8 billion to settle claims of violations of the Fraud Claim Act, illegal promotion of off-label uses for medications, and overcharging Medicare patients.
In the last five years, the size and pace of the settlement announcements has increased. Yet even though the amounts of the fines are going up, the profits for Big Pharma are going up even faster. As a result, they can effectively do as they please with their marketing arms.
What’s Next?
Faced with such a well-financed and poorly regulated industry, your doctor doesn’t really stand a chance. The situation is so far out of control that even members of Congress – who experience more than $150 million in direct pharmaceutical lobbying annually – have put forth a motion to make pharmaceutical companies reveal where and how they are spending their money.
The disclosure requirement is limited to firms who have at least one product covered by Medicaid or Medicare. It covers everything from royalty payments for device development to small items, like free food provided at a medical event. However, the proposal is being delayed by lobbyists (surprise, surprise), and there is no word on when it will go into effect. Violators would have to pay $10,000 per item undisclosed, but given that Big Pharma happily settles multiple million-dollar claims each year, that doesn’t seem like much of a penalty even if the law is enacted.
There’s no denying that the system is a mess. The ObamaCare debate keeps public attention elsewhere, but informed consumers need to know what Big Pharma is doing while everyone’s distracted. It’s the only way you’ll have a chance to protect your health from over-medication when you go to the doctor’s office!
©2013 Off The Grid News
Loading ...
Pharmaceutical Company reps have a standing practice of bringing huge platters of top of the line Deli meats, cheeses and fruits to Doctors offices once a week! This practice is not even blinked at! So how are Doctors wined and dined while in college and at conventions, etc. The best practice I would encourage is to read the side effects paper at the Pharmacy where you are getting your drugs and read ALL of it especially the interaction with other Drugs that you might be taking already from other doctors! Talk to the pharmacist too about what the interactions may be! At 64 years of age, I take NO drugs except for ocasional colds and this winter I took nothing! Given the huge impact that Baby Boomers will have on the medical system, it behooves you to take care of your own health with diiet and exercise and Avoid pharmaceuticals as long as possible or always! Remember that some drugs effect areas not talked about such as your Brain and heart, and other organs, Thyroid while residues interact for a long time in other tissues. Ever wonder just why Funerals have auch heavy Caskets and put it into a concrete vault? The heavily medicated body won’t decompose the residuies of Chemo and other drugs into the soil and contaminate water supplies! Hundreds of years from now scientists will wonder at the naivety of the current population buried. With such harmful toxins poisoned bodies!!!
It is article like this that make me mad. You see I am one of those dreaded Pharma reps that has this article use its broad brush to make us look like evil people. It’s called capitalism folks. I dod’t see articles about car manufactures selling cars that cost half of what they are made for for double profits. See, even I can paint a picture that car companies are in it with the government…oh yeah, they are!
For most who read this it makes Big Pharma look ugly. However, Big Pharma has given people longer life spans. Better quality of life. And in some cases has even saved lives. But lets not print that, it might make them look good.
My particular products are not covered very well. The insurance industry continues to regulate the doctors and continues to regulate the patient. Yet you don’t mention them at all.
I am against the Obamacare like no other. I strive to promote my products ethically. I DO NOT “wine and Dine” because I don’t have the budget to do so. You heard it. Sometimes the only way I get to do my JOB is to provide lunch for a physicians staff and family, (yes family). What does this get me? 2-3 minutes to try and convince (sell) a doctor on why my product is good for his patients. You hear that? for his patients….it’s not about me. It never will be. It is about making a patient better.
In a recent study performed at the University of Texas. They compared the strengths of my a common “brand name” topical steroid used for treating dermatitis. Of the 5 generic equivalent products, only one came close to the potency that they were supposed to be listed as. This research was done independent of Big Pharma.
But do you hear about those studies? No, because they make the insurance companies look evil….All I ask is that you do your research before you paint with such a big brush. Give real facts, and if you don’t have them, don’t just give opinions and make them look like facts. We have enough of that in the Main stream media!
As for messenger2000 comment. She is dead on with her opinion. Read everything you can. But don’t vilify what you don’t really know.
I used to be a pharma rep. I agree completely with toddclark1212 in that Big Pharma is often vilified. We all have choices to make, and there are docs who take nothing from reps/companies to keep their opinions unbiased, and there are docs who will take whatever they can get their hands on and be bought. Most of the biggest pharma companies have a code of ethics in that they do not purchase anything for docs other than providing lunches for appointments. I now sell new technology / scientific equipment directly to big pharma for research. The scientists I sell to want nothing more than to discover/develop a drug that will help mankind. They truly have no alterior motive other than to be successful in their science projects. My main point of all this is to point out that we all have to be responsible for the choices we make and who we allow to persuade us. It is not right to blame big pharma for trying to run a successful business. It is the docs responsibility to be ethical in his prescribing habits; it is the patients job to do their due diligence in researching what we are being prescribed and ask questions. Personal responsibility is everything!