Find Out If Your Doctor Is Being Paid By Drug Companies To Prescribe Their Drugs
It is unethical for doctors to accept gifts from pharmaceutical companies. It is estimated the drug companies spend between $20 and $57 billion a year and marketing to and influencing doctors to recommend their drugs to their patients.
Imagine how much money these companies most be making to be able to afford that amount of money on direct marketing?
Drug companies spend on average $15,000 on gifts, dinner, travel, and other perks per physician every year to market their drugs to doctors.[1]
This is a serious conflict of interest because doctors can be persuaded to prescribe medicine that may not be the best medicine for their patients. 94% of doctors take gifts from drug companies.
They approve of the practice of receiving gifts from drug companies, but they don’t want their patients to know they are accepting gifts.
It is unethical that this practice exists, but if Congressmen and Congresswomen can be bought who are we to think doctors can’t be bought?
Give Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and round of applause for doing the right thing by inserting the Physician Payment Sunshine Act into the Affordable Care Act. As a result of this Act you are now able to see if your doctor or any other doctor has received gifts from drug companies.
First the first time you are able to search a database and find out if you doctor is being paid off by drug companies. Go to OpenPaymentsData.CMS.gov or Dollars For Docs and search for your doctor. Let us hope your doctor isn’t in the database.
[1] S Chimonas, T A Brennan, D J Rothman. Physicians and drug representatives: exploring the dynamics of the relationship. J Gen Intern Med. 2007 Feb;22(2):184-90.
