The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare continue to release reams of data, by way of its Open Payments project, and today we see some interesting factoids on how physicians are paid.
The Pew Charitable Trust released the graphic below, which contains this nugget: more than $27 billion was spent by the pharmaceutical industry on marketing drugs to physicians. That includes payments, gifts, meals, drug samples or travel. Quite the bouquet.
Pew, CMS and others believe that transparency will be the cure, noting that 70 percent of consumers think providers should disclose such payments publicly.
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Allan Coukell, Pew’s senior director of drugs and medical devices, said this:
“This is a significant accomplishment. The first release of data discloses some $3.5 billion in payments from industry to doctors and hospitals over a five-month period. While not all individual payment information has yet been published, this nevertheless represents a new level of transparency that will help inform patients and the public.”
He noted that “some financial relationships between manufactures and doctors are necessary, and reflect the collaboration between medicine and industry …” But other “gifts and payments …add expense to already unsustainable healthcare costs and create conflicts of interest.”
