How much money does your healthcare provider make or take from big pharma?
This was a good time to discuss this topic, after we had a good hard look at the influenza mortality rates despite more than 200 million flu shots going into arms each year. The mortality rate never changed. So why did healthcare providers (physicians, PA’s, nurse practitioners) keep promoting the vaccines even if mortality did not go down? Remember, the goal is to not die. Cases can be whatever they are. Death is what we look at. We do not want you to die. So if the treatment we give you to prevent death is not working, why do we keep doing it?
Money. Coercion. Big pharma.
Man, this one is a hard one to write. Because I know this game all too well. If anyone doubted that pharmaceutical industries run healthcare, well, this may open your eyes to it a little bit more.
Pharmaceutical companies are multi-billion dollar corporations who have one goal: to make money. Period. Profit is their game. They tell you “oh its research and development that is so expensive. No. It is not. A fraction of the pharma dollars go into R&D. The majority of it goes into paying their shareholders massive dividends based on the success of that drug.
So how do they make sure this product earns their company millions/billions of dollars per year? Well, they have to get that drug in front of the people that will TAKE them and the people that will PRESCRIBE them! And lemme tell ya, that is an intense game of persuasion! They hire pharma reps as salespeople, paid to promote their company drug to medical providers, while they target YOU the CONSUMER with TV commercials that tell you that Claritin will make your world colorful without allergies again, Fanapt will stop the voices in your head, and Latuda will prevent you from buying 5 cameras on Amazon because your mania will go away. The companies bombard you, the consumer, with more ads and pamphlets in healthcare lobbies, encouraging you to “talk to your doctor” about the med, while the pharma reps are paid to work the providers. Would you be surprised to learn that in 2020, pharmaceutical companies accounted for 75% of ALL advertising dollars on television??? While they are running the massive in your face ad campaigns on television, they are also greasing up the prescribers who can give you the medication they make. They give the prescriber drug samples. They buy lunch. They drop off snacks, cookies, Starbucks, breakfast, you name it, if it is a food product, a drug rep will bring it to a medical office. They have to do that in order to get face time with a prescriber. Because most of us are too busy to stand and chat for 10 minutes, so if they feed you lunch, it is guaranteed time to promote their drug. Does the prescriber feel a little more “upscale” and would rather have an out of office meeting? Well they have that covered too, with fancy after office hours dinners at fancy restaurants with a guest speaker who is paid to promote the drug FOR the pharma company. Now one key thing to keep in mind here: pharma companies only hire reps to promote drugs that are NOT GENERIC. They only sell them hard when they are brand only, still on patent. When the patent holding pharma company (Pfizer, Sunovion, Otsuka, etc) make their multi million/billion dollar profits from the drug at overly inflated retail prices. Generic medications do not have pharma reps. There is no money to be made with generic drugs. (This is an important fact to remember)
For the record, I do not participate in ANY pharma free food, fancy restaurant programs, freebies, ink pens, …….. NOTHING. I will not promote these brand drugs to ANY of my patients aside from an exceptional situation where it will truly benefit a patient, I can get the drug company to pay for it for my patient, or I can get insurance to cover it. I do not play the pharma game. But you would be shocked at who does.
Here is a fun website.
https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/
Go to the search bar. The data is not up to date, you can only search through 2020. The 2021 data is not available yet. Enter your providers last name, first name. And just have a look at what kind of pharma bucks YOUR provider is taking from big pharma companies! *CAVEAT HERE: IF YOUR PROVIDER WORKS FOR A HOSPITAL SYSTEM, THEY MAY NOT SHOW UP UNDER THEIR NAME. SEARCH THE HOSPITAL NAME, AND SEE HOW MUCH $$ THEY ACCEPT. Would you be shocked to learn that a provider standing up at a pharma sponsored event and speaking about a pharma product will earn them, on average, $2500? Wow. That is pretty easy money for 30 minutes of your time, a free meal, and gas to and from the speaking engagement. And do you think that the provider raking in $2500+ per speaking engagement is not biased to prescribe that medication? Heck no they most certainly are biased! Because to stay on each year and have your pharma speaking gig contract renewed, you gotta show you are using their product! And oh here is the fun part! The drug companies have access to ALL PRESCRIBERS DATA!!!! They can look you up in their fancy database to see what meds you are prescribing, and if you are not prescribing their drug, they pressure you harder, compare THEIR drug and how much better it is than the drug you prescribe most commonly, and try to convince you to switch your patients to THEIR drug instead.
I want to be very clear here. The pharma reps are doing the job they were hired to do. They are salespeople. It is not unlike going to a car lot and looking at a nice new SUV and the dealer on the lot trying to close the deal. That is their job. The higher their sales in their territory, the higher the bonus they make. You cannot fault them for doing the job they were hired to do. These are all people with a family to support, orthodontist bills to pay, college tuition is due, etc. They are salespeople. And sales is sales whether it is selling a drug, a new pacemaker device, a car, a motorcycle, a house, timeshare, etc. Sales is sales. So you can’t hate the sales pharma rep for this. But you can certainly hate their bosses and the corporation they work for because THAT is where the corruption of healthcare happens. It’s higher up the food chain. They make the rules. Those reps buy food and snacks and bring samples because THEIR BOSSES tell them to do this. It isn’t their decision. Also, who the pharma company chooses to be a drug speaker is not the pharma reps doing. That is a nasty little back door deal between the pharma company “higher up’s” and the prescriber. THIS NASTY DEAL IS BETWEEN CORPORATE PHARMA AND THE PRESCRIBERS WHO ARE TAKING MONEY from these companies to promote their product and in return prescribing the drug they get paid to speak about. That is where I call horse crap. Because you are no longer acting in the best interest of your patient, you are looking out for your wallet and increasing your yearly income. You are selling out your medical license credentials for a pharma paycheck. Every hour you spend pimping the drug you speak for, is appointment spots you are not seeing patients. Because the reimbursement from insurance to see patients during that hour is a couple thousand dollars less than what pharma is gonna pay you. So they sell out and take the payday. I wonder how they sleep at night to be honest. Because it is not ethical. It is a conflict of interest. And the medication prescribers taking these large sums of money ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SALESPEOPLE! They are supposed to help people. Not corporate pharma. Oh yeah…..and 99% of pharma paid drug speakers earning these thousands of dollars per speaking gig are MD PHYSICIANS.
I screen shot some examples. The first one is from 2017. Local physician. He raked in over 100 THOUSAND DOLLARS in pharma speaking fees. And it lists every drug company that paid what amount. No money given to do research. This money was made by standing up and speaking to other healthcare workers to convince THEM to prescribe this drug. Physicians use the good ol “I have found great success with my patients taking this drug so you should use it to”.
I love this one. In 2020, another local physician made $70k in pharma bucks. DURING A PANDEMIC. When *supposedly* all the pharma reps were banished to working at home, and no speaking engagements were happening? Well how did this cat rake in $70k?!?! Online VIRTUAL speaking engagements. The physician sat on a zoom call from home, connected via zoom with an office of medical and physician staff and promoted the drug via web feed. And got a great payday for that!!!!
As long as providers who write prescriptions are willing to take the bucks to go speak and promote the drugs for pharma, this will not end. As long as the FDA decides its legal for providers to accept big bucks from pharma, this will not end. They “claimed” to clean up the pharma game by eliminating the sticky note pads and ink pens. That is laughable. Because as long as you are paying the prescriber to PROMOTE the drug, you didn’t fix anything. Except force the medical offices to buy their own ink pens.
So to put an end cap on this, does this help you understand how paying medication prescribers big bucks leads to corruption? Money talks. So imagine this on a larger scale. Imagine the millions of dollars a pharma company will pay an institution to use their product? Or to write a paper about how great their medication is and publish it in a journal? Or to say that their drug is the ONLY treatment for an illness? Remember when I said earlier to not forget that only non-generic brand drugs on patent are heavily promoted by pharma? Well, is the name Remdesivir familiar to anyone? The only fix for a covid patient in the hospital with covid? Or Plaxovid? The only oral medication to treat EARLY covid? Both of those drugs are brand, not generic, and promoted by Gilead and Pfizer as money making brand drugs. You think medication prescribers aren’t making money off those right now? Hospitals aren’t making bank off those drugs? What if, there were medications to TREAT covid that were cheap generic meds. But they do not make pharma money. So they ignored them.
What if, hundreds of thousands of people died that did not need to from covid?
What if, big pharma is responsible for the deaths of millions of people?