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Comment by ranger_danger | Hacker News Reader

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Doctors don’t get paid for writing prescriptions. They don’t get kickbacks for writing prescriptions. A small subset of doctors are paid by pharmaceutical companies to run trials or provide expertise, but you can look that up since it’s publicly available information, and it’s not based on them prescribing you anything.

At most a drug rep comes by and brings donuts or something to talk about their new drugs.

Source wife is a doctor.

https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/

https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/

Now go drill down into what those payments are for. The vast majority is for running trials. Each payment is tracked, and you can drill down into each one.

If you don’t want a doctor who takes money to run clinical trials, use this database to avoid them. It’s not hard.

My dad got box seats to a hockey game when I was a wee lad so theyll sometimes throw money at docs

Thanks to Obama and the Sunshine Act, this basically never happens anymore.

https://www.mdlinx.com/article/a-physician-s-guide-to-accept...

Increased reporting requirements and a cap on the value of these gifts that is far too low for box seats.

My wife's a physician, and I've seen these things change dramatically. Sometimes some food for the whole office will get dropped off. Or donuts. No one's getting box seats to a pro sports game anymore.

The rules changed around a decade ago to limit the amount of gifts a doctor could receive from pharmaceutical companies.

They get paid in lower risk deductibles. If a patient demands a drug they saw on commercials, the doctor can reduce liability by prescribing it in many cases.

Doctors don’t have less liability if they give the patient something they ask for.

It’s certainly not enough of an effect that doctors make decisions on what to prescribe based on their malpractice insurance premiums.

Sure they do, it’s why doctors these days prescribe pills versus recommending healthy habits.

There are no healthy habit recommendations anymore in many practices due to anti shame culture etc.

This is different to other parts of the world with healthier citizens.

Anti-shame culture is not what we’re talking about. What we were talking about was doctors prescribing pills that patients asked for to lower their liability, which is nonsense.

Doctors are humans though and if people repeatedly ask for a specific treatment some percentage of them will offer it. That’s how drug advertising impacts prescriptions. Nothing to do with liability.

Wonder how the "online star-rating economy" affects US doctors.

That 100% impacts doctors. It’s well known that doctors who prescribe unnecessary antibiotics get higher ratings.

Huh? Drug reps have scorecards for the doctors they call on and throw perks at the top performers or influencers. It also depends on the speciality - dermatologists working for price equity mills are almost evaluated like salespeople. Source: girlfriend is a rep.

Yeah and what are those perks? Pens, t-shirts, backpacks, posters for patient rooms?

Steak dinners and briefings at the beach.

Each one of those has to be reported and the information is publicly available.

Perks for prescriptions is illegal.

If your GF is really keeping score and rewarding doctors for performance, she’s breaking anti kickback laws. All that has to happen is for prosecutor to make the connection.

I know a guy who spent 3 years in prison for something very very close to what you just described. He was just a rep and he said he was just doing what his company told him to do, but they threw him under the bus and now he’s a felon.

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