Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20230
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: Magazine
Levin AA
Kickbacks
HealthFacts 1994 Oct
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0815/is_n185_v19/ai_15852403/
Full text:
Last month, the Office of the Inspector General, Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) issued a “Special Fraud Alert” targeting aggressive drug industry marketing involving cash and other payments to doctors and pharmacists to promote specific products. The Inspector General warned that such schemes may be in violation of Medicare and Medicaid anti-kickback laws (American Medical News, 29 August 1994). DHHS is concerned that aggressive promotional incentives could harm patients if they influence doctors to make medically inappropriate prescribing choices.
The alert spotlights three different marketing programs. The first involves payments made by drug companies to pharmacists to persuade doctors to switch prescriptions from a competitor’s drug to one of its own. One example of the so-called “bounty” scheme involved Miles Incorporated paying pharmacists $35 each time they got a doctor to switch a patient to the Miles anti-angina drug Adalat CC from Pfizer’s rival drug Procardia. The pharmacist “bounty” programs are so pervasive that the Attorneys General of 20 states have asked FDA Commissioner David Kessler for his help in stopping the practice (Scrip, 9 September 1994).
The second marketing effort features a drug company awarding doctors “points” towards a free airline ticket each time they complete a questionnaire stating they had newly prescribed the company’s product. In 1993, Ayerst paid $830,000 to settle civil and administrative claims arising out of such a “frequent flier” program involving 20,000 doctors.
In the third scheme, drug companies make substantial payments to doctors which are labeled “research grants.” In return, the doctors have only to make brief notes about treatment outcomes. In August, a federal grand jury charged one drug distributor, Caremark International, with kickbacks involving the human growth hormone, Protropin. The grand jury charged that Caremark paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Minneapolis doctor disguised as research grants and consulting fees in return for his prescribing Protropin.
These drug company improprieties add to ongoing controversy about the ethics of doctors and pharmacists accepting gifts from manufacturers. Promotions featuring golf and tennis weekends at expensive resorts have reportedly been scaled back as a result of 1990 American Medical Association (AMA) guidelines calling for limits on gifts to doctors to those of “nominal value and those with direct educational or patient benefit.” The AMA guidelines were quickly adopted by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group. But, according to the DHHS inspector general’s office, one result is that companies are using “more sophisticated ways to get money to doctors.” (Wall Street Journal, 23 August 1994). RxNews suggests that an outright ban on any cash or in-kind gift or payment to individual doctors or pharmacists is required in order to protect the public.
Bibliography for: “Kickbacks – payments to physicians by pharmaceutical industry for product promotion”
Arthur A. Levin “Kickbacks – payments to physicians by pharmaceutical industry for product promotion”. Center for Medical Consumers. FindArticles.com. 07 Jul, 2012.
