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https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/s-wtr030617.php
More than three in every five Americans see a doctor who receives some form of payment from industry. This is according to a new survey led by Genevieve Pham-Kanter of Drexel University's Dornsife School of Public Health in the US. It is the first nationally representative study to examine the prevalence of industry payments among the general population of patients.
[...] The survey was done in light of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which addresses concerns that industry payments could lead physicians to make decisions that are not in the best interest of their patients. Since 2013 the Act requires pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers to report gifts and payments they make to healthcare providers. This information is publicly available on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' Open Payments website.
[...] The survey highlighted that 65 percent of respondents had visited a physician who accepted an industry payment. This was particularly the case for those visiting family medicine physicians (63 percent) and obstetricians and gynecologists (77 percent).
The Open Payments website can be found at: https://www.cms.gov/OpenPayments/index.html
References:
Pham-Kanter, G. , Mello, M., Lehmann, L., Campbell, E., Carpenter, D. (2017). Public Awareness of and Contact with Physicians Who Receive Industry Payments: A National Survey, Journal of General Internal Medicine, DOI: 10.1007/s11606-017-4012-3
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @10:59AM (5 children)
Imagine a weapon that can strike at the speed of light with deadly precision without revealing the source of the attack. This is what money has become.
The problem of the article is just a small aspect of the bigger problem, which is, people are permitted to control through money things that generate conflict of interest, which is a conduit for more and more safe income.
The biggest problem is that those who fight this are mostly concerned with the fact that they are not nearer the top of the pyramid, instead of looking at the minimum effort through which money can be made again a mere interface for the exchange of things.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 08 2017, @02:29PM (4 children)
Imagine a weapon that can strike at the speed of light with deadly precision without revealing the source of the attack. This is what money has become. The problem of the article is just a small aspect of the bigger problem, which is, people are permitted to control through money things that generate conflict of interest, which is a conduit for more and more safe income.
The biggest problem is that those who fight this are mostly concerned with the fact that they are not nearer the top of the pyramid, instead of looking at the minimum effort through which money can be made again a mere interface for the exchange of things.
Let me make the obvious rebuttal here. People are permitted to control things that generate conflicts of interest because the US is a democracy. You change that and you no longer have a democracy. We already have laws for dealing with doctors who accept bribes and cause harm to their patients as well as medical vendors who provide such bribes. What is required is enforcement of those laws, not finding new ways to break our societies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @03:11PM (3 children)
Let me make the obvious rebuttal here.
The Obvious Rebuttal Drinking Game!
Every time you say "the obvious rebuttal" everybody takes a shot.
Drink!
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 08 2017, @04:36PM (2 children)
Every time you say "the obvious rebuttal" everybody takes a shot.
I thought it was "obvious rebuttal" instead of "the obvious rebuttal". Guess I'll have to tune my prose better for maximum impact.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday March 09 2017, @09:26AM (1 child)
It was more of an "oblivious rebuttal"... The US being a type of democracy is not really relevant to industry being able to bribe physicians semi-legally, other than enabling industry to bribe our legislators semi-legally to look the other way. Likely, the term you were looking for was capitalism.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday March 09 2017, @02:44PM
Likely, the term you were looking for was capitalism.
Not relevant either. Absence of capitalism (such as the oxymoronic "state capitalism" systems) still results in immense conflicts of interest. The problem here is not that we have a system with conflicts of interest. Nor is it that we don't have rules to protect patients against systemic bribery of doctors. There are a variety of tools that probably would be applicable right now, such as RICO, fraud statutes, truth in advertising laws, and anti-monopoly/cartel/price-fixing laws. While there is inadequate enforcement of regulation, that's not really the problem either. The problem is that such a complex system with such a clueless regulatory environment has been set up that wholesale bribery of doctors can go on for decades without triggering concern from any groups participating in the system.
That I think comes from having a huge number of unrealistic expectations, priorities, and burdens placed on the system, such as (by no means a complete list!) near complete separation of the consumer of health care from the billing for health care, the strong prioritization of universal health care and insurance over reducing the cost of health care and insurance, regulators that prioritize the small number of deaths from testing of new medical treatments over the many lives that could be saved by employing these new medical treatments, and using insurance for fully predictable health care costs. Notice that none of the items I mentioned here are inherently capitalist in nature.
I don't think that is all due to capitalists bribing legislatures (though I agree that is a problem). A lot of this is politicians delivering wish fulfillment for a rather clueless electorate, or ideas that probably sounded good at the time and didn't work out, but didn't go away either.