This kind of self-serving doggerel undercuts the pharma industry's credibilty, and that of the prescribers they court. In the long run, Big Pharma risks bringing price controls on to themselves partly through their own duplicitousness.
>>Insurers, doctors and drug makers said such payments were so embedded in the structure of the health care industry that the Bush administration plan would be profoundly disruptive.
Moreover, doctors said that drug companies were a major source of money for their professional education programs, and that the administration proposal could drastically reduce such subsidies.
"Without financial support from industry, medical societies would most likely be forced to curtail or stop offering these important educational activities," said Dr. Michael D. Maves, executive vice president of the American Medical Association.<<
It is bizarre that physicians say that their continuing education efforts would stop if someone else isnt paying for them. Just in the mental health field: psychologists, neuropsychologists, and psychiatric social workers develop and benefit from professional education programs that are state-mandated for licensure. The costs of such programs are borne by the professional attendees, and is seen as a cost of doing business. The fact that so many physicians do not see it that way epitomizes how engrained their symbiosis with pharmaceutical largesse is.
I have not tried to calculate how many millions are spent in the US each year on jumbo shrimp, open bars, and similar perks by Big Pharma, but it would be enough to buy a couple of the microcap companies now struggling to survive long enough to bring novel technologies of value through development. Big Pharma would invite less skeptical appraisal by the FDA (e.g. around disseminating off-label information) if their marketing operations did not look so much like Happy Hour at the Mustang Ranch.
Harry Tracy
NeuroInvestment |
