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Can Big Pharma Actually Buy a Doctor's Allegiance for a $20 Meal?
As the Fiscal Times reported in March, a new study by the independent publication ProPublica revealed that physicians who receive payments from major drug and medical device manufacturers are far more inclined to prescribe brand name medications than doctors who don’t accept payments, gifts or other honoraria.
What’s more, the bigger the payments they receive, the more doctors tend to take out their prescription pads and steer their patients to the newer brand name drugs instead of the far less expensive generic drugs that essentially have the same effect. For instance, docs who received more than $5,000 from drug companies and others in 2014 for speeches, meals, consultations or other promotional activities “typically had the highest brand name prescribing percentages,” ProPublica found.
But a new study published Monday on-line on JAMA Internal Medicine that makes a similar case strains credulity.
The report’s findings were based on analysis of federal government data that tracked and correlated payments received by doctors and the prescriptions they wrote under Medicare Part D. The study focused on 2,444 Massachusetts physicians who wrote prescriptions in 2011.
The study focused on the prescriptions that were written for three specific statin drugs: AstraZeneca PLC’s cholesterol-reducing Crestor; Allergan PC’s Bystolic that is used to treat high blood pressure, and Daiichi Sankyo Co.”s Benicar, another treatment for high blood pressure. Each of those drugs has a less costly generic alternative.
Researchers found that 899 of the physicians, or 37 percent of the total, had received payments from the drug industry. Most commonly, those payments came in the form of free meals. Among those doctors, they prescribed the brand name statin 23 percent of the time, By contrast, the other doctors who hadn’t received industry payments prescribed those brand name drugs 18 percent of the time.
“Industry payments to physicians are associated with higher rates of prescribing brand name statins,” the study concluded. “As the United States seeks to rein in the costs of prescription drugs and make them less expensive for patients, our findings are concerning.”
However, as ProPublica’s senior health care reporter Charles Ornstein noted in an analysis of the latest study, “The researchers did not determine if there was a cause-and-effect relationship between payments and prescribing, a far more difficult proposition, but their study adds to a growing pile of research documenting a link between the two.”
And PhRMA complained to the Journal that the study essentially “cherry picked” physician-prescribing data “to advance a false narrative.”