Doctors received $6.5 billion from drug companies in 2015
Washington - Doctors received $6.5 billion worth of payments -- including meals, research grants and charitable contributions from drug and medical device companies in the last year, according to new data released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Thursday. They also owned a little over $1 billion in stock in the industry.
The financial relationships between 618,000 doctors and 1,110 teaching hospitals and nearly 1,500 companies are required to be disclosed under a provision in the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as the "Physician Payments Sunshine Act," because it aims to reveal the breadth and extent of the relationships between doctors and companies.
Drug companies have long argued that such relationships are necessary for education, but critics say these payments are powerful marketing tools that can distort the use of health care in ways that drive up spending or lead to medical decisions that follow a company's commercial interests instead of the best medicine.
The biggest giver was Novartis, which reported $539 million in payments. Genentech provided $470 million in payments, followed closely by Pfizer, with $436 million.
The data show little change from last year, when doctors received $6.4 billion in payments and owned about $1 billion in stock. But there are some intriguing shifts, including an increase in drug company payments to doctors that were classified as charitable contributions and a decrease in gifts, entertainment, honoraria and other categories that may raise the most urgent questions about conflicts of interest.
The analysis also found that a little more than 637,000 financial interactions between doctors and drug companies were related to opioid painkillers -- more than 2 percent of the payments tracked.
The physicians that received the most payments on average were those in nuclear medicine, with the average total payment of $51,279 -- followed by neurologists and orthopedic surgeons.
The Washington Post