Drug Company Kickbacks - Dollars for Docs

We depend on the expertise and integrity of doctors to do what is best for our health. When my now-ex neurologist put me on the drug Tysabri and told me the risks were manageable, I trusted him.

Previous entries in this blog show how my ex neurologist and the drugs he prescribed eventually lost my trust. I got tired of getting more and more disabled, and I got tired of drug company sales reps getting priority over me in the MS clinic waiting room. Only fear, anger, good fortune and good luck led me to Dr. Burt and HSCT to get me off the cash cow drug treadmill that had me stumbling toward a wheelchair.

Now, finally, the Affordable Care Act will require drug companies to report payments made to doctors. Part of what drove that legislation was investigative reporting and outcry from patients. The nonprofit organization Propublica has already disseminated much information. Large pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Novartis began reporting their payments to doctors as a condition of settling federal whistleblower lawsuits. But the world's biggest MS drug company, Biogen Idec, has not reported anything yet.  As of tomorrow, they will be required to by law to begin reporting that money.  It's about damn time!  The Probublica article below includes a search engine to check on the payments particular doctors receive from drug companies.  It won't be complete for awhile, but it's a start that should get better over time. You owe it to yourself and your loved ones to check your health professional against this database.

What We’ve Learned From Four Years of Diving Into Dollars for Docs

Payments from pharmaceutical companies touch hundreds of thousands of doctors. 

The information is being made public under a provision of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The law mandates disclosure of payments to doctors, dentists, chiropractors, podiatrists and optometrists for things like promotional speaking, consulting, meals, educational items and research.

It's not quite clear what the data will show — in part because the first batch will be incomplete, covering spending for only a few months at the end of 2013 — but we at ProPublica have some good guesses. That's because we have been detailing relationships between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry for the past four years as part of our Dollars for Docs project.

We've aggregated information from the websites of some large drug companies, which publish their payments as a condition of settling federal whistle-blower lawsuits alleging improper marketing or kickbacks. Today, in cooperation with the website Pharmashine, we've added data for 2013, which now covers 17 drug companies accounting for half of United States drug sales that year. (You can look up your doctor using our easy search tool.

http://www.propublica.org/article/what-weve-learned-from-four-years-of-diving-into-dollars-for-docs