One of the problems with America’s healthcare industry is that it’s set up much like the rest of American industry–based on generating maximum revenues and profits. The real revenues and profits are in two primary areas: medical devices and pharmaceutical products.
So it shouldn’t be a huge surprise when we learn that companies in these areas are paying off doctors and their associates to gain influence, and make sales. The New York Times has had interesting coverage of payoffs in the devices area (hundreds of thousands being paid to individual surgeons) and in the pharmaceutical area (payoffs to medical people to steer people toward one company’s insulin product). In that pharmaceutical article, we learn that annual insulin sales exceed $3 billion annually…and gain new insights as to why the diabetes epidemic (and other chronic diseases) are such lucrative market niches to Big Pharma.
The American Medical Association, a bastion of free enterprise for doctors, has even felt compelled to question the cozy business arrangements between doctors and Big Pharma in a recent issue of its magazine, JAMA. It recommends that physicians refrain from taking free sample products from the pharmaceuticals and avoid consulting arrangements that aren’t specific in their requirements. These are positive moves, but I suspect that as long as the profit motive is the health care system’s driving force, the industry’s businesses will continually find new ways to use practitioners to promote and sell.
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