Big Pharma Paid 700 Doctors Over A Million Bucks Each. Tell Us Again How Single-Payer Is Too Pricey? [View all]

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https://www.wonkette.com/pharma-propublica


Big Pharma Paid 700 Doctors Over A Million Bucks Each. Tell Us Again How Single-Payer Is Too Pricey?
Doktor Zoom
October 19, 2019 12:45 PM


One of the quiet scandals of US America's for-profit healthcare "system" is the routine bribery of doctors by pharmaceutical companies. We're not talking the free pens and notepads with drug logos, but generous funding for travel, "consulting," and speaking fees to "educate" other doctors at conferences. A new ProPublica report found that the amount of money the industry pays to doctors hasn't changed, despite efforts to call attention to the potential conflicts of interest. And some doctors are really making out like bandits, while prescription drug prices continue to go through the roof.

That's not a mixed metaphor, that's American healthcare today: a bandit house with holes in the roof.

ProPublica notes that when it reported on Big Pharma's gravy train in 2013, it found that over the course of four years,

one doctor had earned $1 million giving promotional talks and consulting for drug companies; 21 others had made more than $500,000.

That's nothing, it turns out. In its latest review of payment data, ProPublica found over 2,500 physicians who'd received at least half a million bucks over the last five years, from pharma and medical device companies. More than 700 of the docs had made over a million dollars in the same time. Honestly, take a few minutes to click around ProPublica's interactive "Dollars for Docs" page, where you can find information on payouts to doctors and teaching hospitals in your state, the most generous companies and heavily-promoted meds, and a list of the top ten doctors getting pharmabucks. The biggest winner is a Memphis neurosurgeon who raked in $29 million, which must make the number-ten doc, a San Diego dentist who collected just $6.25 million, feel like an underachiever.

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So hooray for transparency! Now that the reporting is mandated, as Kesselheim told ProPublica, "we need to figure out what to do with this," since just making the information public doesn't appear to be changing a damn thing.

Here's a crazy idea: Take obscene profits out of the equation and institute Euro-style single payer and strict price controls? Haha, we are joking, no one wants to live in a socialist hellhole like France, where people can't even go bankrupt from medical treatment.