Whistleblowers: Drug company offered 'bribes' to doctors to boost sales

It's disheartening that this med is being used to treat infants and they wouldn't even leave those helpless babies alone. Healthcare is a $3.5 trillion dollar per year industry and is powering 20% of U.S economy, but I think the problem goes a lot deeper and further than just the medical field. This is a systematic issue across all industries where profits are increasingly being prioritized above everything else, even when it involves the most basic and essential human values.

Is the rapid increase of population part of the cause? Overpopulation often means the value of each individual will be decreased since anyone is now easily replaceable and becomes irrelevant. There are no signs this trend is going to stop anytime soon. I fear there has to be a massive catastrophic event to happen in order to trigger any societal changes at this level.

"Drug company offered 'bribes' to doctors to boost sales": I don't see how that headline constitutes news to anyone with even just a passing familiarity with how this market works.

I am originally from Hungary, from a small town. My aunt is an assistant for a child doctor.

Every single doctor here gets approached by multiple drug companies, being offered expensive vacations and similar perks (if not outright money) for prescribing the company's medications.

One particular doctor who is an absolutely disgusting and vile human being describes antibiotics for every ailment. He essentially ruined thousands of children's health for said perks. It got so bad the word spread in the town and apart from the least informed families no one took their children to this doctor if they could avoid it.

But this is just one doctor. The other 2 who practiced here also accepted rewards, but were a bit more sensible with it, but not by much. According to my aunt this is an incredibly widespread problem, and one that has been going on for decades.

I can't imagine anything more atrocious than sacrificing children's health for material gain. A person who is support to protect life and does this... I'm not religious and I seldom wish ill fate to people, but I do hope there is a hell for these kind of people.

1) this is a lot more uncommon than people seem to suggest. Note from this article, they found -288- docs. In a country with a little over 1,000,000 physicians.

2) the real problem is the legislation congress pushed through barring Medicare from negotiating drug prices. “Many of those sales are driven by Medicare reimbursements. A CNN investigation last year found that Medicare spending on Acthar had risen dramatically -- more than tenfold over six years -- to some $2 billion.” the article went ahead and glossed right over it, but if Medicare is your prime payer and can actually push back on price jumps, -this doesn’t happen-.

I know a 'pharmaceutical representative'. She is little more than a corporate prostitute - and I mean that sincerely.

She is paid to take doctors on dinner dates, woo them and give them 'free samples', and ensure that they promote her product over all the others. She's admitted to me that she regularly has sex with her clients - and that she's a part of a larger team that covers the entire German market.

Its such a normal, accepted practice, that my surprise at her frank attitude about it was met with a "well, duh, how do you think we stay relevant in such a competitive market?" response ..

Don't want salesmen? Remove the market.

I'm fairly sure there were reports of this happening in the middle of the opioid scandal - the doctors most willing to overprescribe opioids were statistically identified and bribed by the relevant pharma company. Perhaps someone else can find the reference to this?

First heard about this in the documentary Prescription Thug$. The way the industry works in America is bizarre.

Is this a patented drug? If so Congress has the ability to step in and invalidate the patent. Not that they will do it. Those assholes couldn't give a fuck if infants have seizures and die. If not where's the competition? I thought this was a free market. Surely undercutting this price should be easy while still making money. It seems the patent should have expired by itself by now anyway.

This is probably the most egregious example of price gouging in the pharma industry. But it is an outlier and not representative of the whole industry

I feel like there are ~3 groups of high priced drugs:

- straight up profiteering: this is the questcor playbook, that also inspired martin shkreli. companies find cheap old drugs that treat severe rare disease where they can get away with jacking up the price. The companies do no original r&d or new science. This is a rare practice these days and is highly stigmatized in the industry, as this type of practice kicked off a lot of the political debate around drug pricing

- increasing price of "legacy" drugs: big pharma is increasingly bad at r&d. The industry is also in a period where a lot of huge drugs are going off patent. So pharma companies increasingly rely on price increases of mature drugs, rather than development of new drugs, to sustain revenue growth. This is a much bigger phenomenon in dollar terms than the aforementioned profiteering. This is possible mostly for large molecule drugs because the "generic" pathway isn't as mature as small molecules, so the large molecule drugs can have exclusivity after patent expiry. Huge multi billion dollar drugs like humira and enbrel have done this a lot. Private payers are beginning to push back on this pretty effectively, and hopefully as the biosimilars industry matures this will improve.

- innovative, clinically valuable medicines. Some medicines are expensive because they are worth it in health economic terms. The cost per QALY gain is within the "acceptable" range. Most of the industry really does try to develop drugs like these (with varying degrees of conviction), but it's really hard. Companies ideally only want to develop drugs that are first in class or best in class. When that fails (which it usually does) they resort to aforementioned strategies. Unfortunately in many cases these innovative drugs are priced too high. They are often developed by startups and then bought by big pharma once the tech is derisked. Pharma is under huge pressure to grow revenue so they often price these meds too high. Which is a shame bc a lot are amazingly good medicines

Price isn't the only issue though, access is another, although they go hand in hand. Price can be "fair" but access still limited by payers. Copays for drugs are generally higher than for medical procedures, so consumers feel like drug prices are higher than medical procedures, when in reality they are all super high

Stories such as this one highlight the need to address the industry's widespread price gouging head-on. Detecting and punishing the secondary offenses whether they're bribery or peddling off-label uses sub rosa are too unreliable in light of the stakes. We must do better.

The majority of patient facing medical ~professionals are pharma salespeople anyway.

> Drug company offered 'bribes' to doctors to boost sales

Oh wow, such news.

In other shocking developments: water falls from the sky when it rains, and cigarettes are addictive.

As someone outside the U.S. I find this whole pharma-complex absolutely mind-boggling.