…The Obama administration is poised to require drug companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment. Many researchers have found evidence that such payments can influence doctors’ treatment decisions and contribute to higher costs by encouraging the use of more expensive drugs and medical devices…
Under the new standards, if a company has just one product covered by Medicare or Medicaid, it will have to disclose all its payments to doctors other than its own employees. The federal government will post the payment data on a Web site where it will be available to the public.
Manufacturers of prescription drugs and devices will have to report if they pay a doctor to help develop, assess and promote new products…Royalty payments to doctors, for inventions or discoveries, and payments to teaching hospitals for research or other activities will also have to be reported…
Although the Congressional Budget Office does not predict immediate savings, it has said that, “over time, disclosure has the potential to reduce spending,” by reducing instances of overprescribing.
The law also requires drug and device companies to report the amount of “any ownership or investment interest” held by doctors or their immediate family members, other than holdings of publicly traded stocks.
The administration intends to apply the same disclosure requirements to doctor-owned companies that distribute medical devices. Such companies allow doctors to benefit financially from sales of devices they use in surgery.
Do corporate payoffs and kickbacks inspire confidence in your doctor?
Hah! I say HAH==more effective: list what doctors bought how many drinks for the Drug Co’s sales reps. Let the wives lower our healthcare costs “overnight”.
list what doctors bought how many drinks for the Drug Co’s sales reps
Earth calling bobbo… Earth calling bobbo… You don’t seem to get the concept, do you?
Doctors pay for squat!
And, as a man married to an ex-medical assistant, I can tell you that doctors are cheap mother fuckers when it comes to employee pay, benefits, equipment, maintenance or anything else requiring any form of opening of their wallets. (George Washington blinks when light falls on a dollar bill in a doctor’s wallet.)
Let me repeat: Doctors pay for squat!
They actually believe their own press.
Dr. House is not seen as a bumbling and inept diagnostician who almost kills a patient every week because he can’t ever seem to ask the right questions (and should have been replaced by using E-MYCIN [and will be replaced by using Watson gliding over various journals, textbooks, product and interaction databases and whatnot for medical information, {and the internet.}])
Let the wives lower our healthcare costs “overnight”.
Which wives?
The first wives who put them through medical school and who know where all the bodies are buried?
Or the subsequent “trophy wives” who don’t want to know?
You got hope…
If treating you fairly is standing between them and a new fur coat, treating you fairly is going down.
Well mpod==you got me again. What is it now>–4 in a row or would you include your imaginary wins and make it an even 50?
You are right about who pays though. I overly projected myself into that after hours experience. Silly me. Its a loose woman that lets me buy her a drink, I’m the total whore when she pays for it. Bought and sold.
So…salvaging the best of both our ideas: Docs should report what sales reps have bought them drinks ((do we need to be more specific than that?)) and rely on the current trophy wives to bring down what limitations they may. I would not underestimate the the cattiness of “other” doc wives and each doc wife wanting to avoid the cat scratches.
Then, there is always the lack of a pre-nupt. Ha, ha.
Good idea from what is suggested in the article.
It might also be a good way to get doctors off of medicare/caid.
Do corporate payoffs and kickbacks inspire confidence in your doctor?
My doctor is a practitioner of holistic herbal medicine and an acupuncturist that was trained in Hong Kong.
I have required his healing skills twice in twenty years, and both times his treatments were successful and inexpensive.
I have confidence in my doctor.
If this goes through they’ll probably create something equivalent to a Super PAC for drug companies to funnel money through. Ahh the beauty of corruption, always one step ahead.
Loser==your say: “It might also be a good way to get doctors off of medicare/caid.” /// Can you connect those dots for us? I could be wrong but I thought Medicare had a set formulary of approved drugs so I can’t even imagine what you are thinking of.
The Law of Unintended Consequences.
Watch the legitimate doctors drop the research programs like a hot potato.
Bingo. NO doctor wants his name in public like that.
The drug reps I see at my doctors office are mostly thin attractive young women all in black. I mean smokin hot with a briefcase full of who knows what type of poison.
A large proportion of drug company reps are former college cheerleaders. The drug companies recruit them as sales reps right out of college knowing they’ll be fit, attractive, and perky.
Hah! The money the admin will spend on the website will probably outweigh any “savings” from trying to shame the drug companies/doctors.
Ridiculous.
How much has Dr. Obo received from drug companies? Anyone know?
“is poised to require”
Shake down boogie time!
Good! Time to break the drug industry racketeering. Death penalty for those convicted of the REAL drug pushers out there.
Millions of innocent sheeple overdosing on drugs that often conflict with one another, making matters worse.
Stop the insanity.
Well, since you’ve identified the problem as being too many people taking too many drugs, why are we always hearing politicians tring to score political points by promising to make drugs cheaper, incentivising us to take even more of them?
Lemme help with that….
It’s too many people being prescribed too many unneccesary drugs.
And let’s not forget all the drugs pushed on the folks watching that damned tele. Nowadays people are told to ask for specific drugs. Instead of giving a dr. the symptom you tell him what drug you need. Ass backwards.
Exactly. Now drug companies are pushing drugs for conditions like “OA”.
Do you have “OA”? Don’t let OA combined with ED sacrifice your health. It may lead to “BI”
OA: Old Age
ED: Erectile Dysfunction
BI : Bad Itch
Should require that politicians disclose how much they receive in donations from the drug companies on the front page of their websites.
Too many rules, too many exceptions.
Just select instead of elect and you’d be rid of all of that BS.
One term, in and then out, and we’d be rid of all this cozying up between elected officials and lobbyists.
Get rid of the possibility of patronage appointments and lobbying and you could fire a cannon down K Street without hitting anybody.
If they can’t see you coming and there’s no “you need money to get re-elected” hook to catch anybody on, they’re done. They are fuckin’ done. Their work has to stand on its own merits.
I think there may be a buck to be made here. Doctor’s, give me a call.
Perhaps they should publish payments to Obama, from drug companies, insurance companies, and other big corporations.
Here is a site that tracks political lobbying and donations:
OpenSecrets.org
The Center for Responsive Politics is the nation’s premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy. Nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit, the organization aims to create a more educated voter, an involved citizenry and a more transparent and responsive government. In short, the Center’s mission is to:
Inform citizens about how money in politics affects their lives
Empower voters and activists by providing unbiased information
Advocate for a transparent and responsive government
We pursue our mission largely through our award-winning website, OpenSecrets.org, which is the most comprehensive resource for federal campaign contributions, lobbying data and analysis available anywhere. And for other organizations and news media, the Center’s exclusive data powers their online features tracking money in politics — counting cash to make change.
“Do corporate payoffs and kickbacks inspire confidence in your doctor?”
Yep, ever since the took the priest out of the doctor, and put in a businessman.
How about payments – over or under the table to Congress Persons – house or senate ???
This disclosure sounds good, but what will be done with the information?
Will “Joe the Old Person on Medicare” change his behavior?
How much will it cost to “administer” this reporting?
I’d like to know if this will be a net gain for citizens. Hope so. The devil is in the details.
Disclosure is good as long as its actionable.
Otherwise, its like playing ball all by yourself. Its just you and the wall. (Like masturbation without the pleasure.)
On the positive side, some busybody will probably make it his business to slog through the mountain of shit looking for the nugget.
Big data manipulation tools are still very much ad hoc though.
I had to examine a colleges website a coupe of years back. You don’t want to hear how many thousands of pages I* had to scrape and all the links I* had to follow building an N:M model of the data and its relationships.
I’m sure it had never been done because some of the pages were unreachable by normal web navigation, meaning they were dead links to nowhere from nowhere.
*) When I say I, I mean: some software I wrote in Smalltalk. Christ, I’d never navigate the crap myself. I wrote some Smalltalk code and HTML parsers to sweep through the garbage and pick the relevant data.
If he actually follows through on it this will be at least two things that Obama has done right in three years.
What was the first?
Have they posted the payments that government makes to contractors yet?
Liberals have these weird ideas of where medical costs come from. Obama said that doctors prescribe tonsillectomies just to get the money. Then liberals think getting rid of insurance company overhead would save money, when total industry profit is nothing compared to Medicare spending. Then they said it was drug company advertising. And now they think it’s drug company spending on doctor marketing.
Never get around to technological innovation, and that people are spending other people’s money on health care.
I would also like to see some disclosure of doctors’ investment in various testing labs. Because I often wonder if doctors aren’t making a little on the side, for requiring all those yearly blood tests and such? If I got tested yearly, according to my doctor’s wish, it would cost me $300+ out of pocket, every time. My PB drugs only cost me $8 a month. It’s the cost of these tests, that the real killer. There are NO generic tests!
How about publishing the money Obama is taking from Hollywood in return for supporting SOPA? They have currently pledged a boycott because he is opposing it. How many people is the left willing to take down in opposition to SOPA? RedState has called for primaries against Republican Senators, including Marco Rubio.