Drug industry battles for doctors’ time
If you’re looking to see a doctor, bring lunch. That’s one of the finding in a recent article on doctors and drug-company reps published in the latest AARP Bulletin (Ties that Bind, by Barbara Basler).
We found some interesting figures there, figures that otherwise seem to go unpublicized. For example, the pharmaceutical industry’s spending on direct marketing to doctors rose 275% from 1996 to 2004 and currently stands around $7 billion. That doesn’t count prescription samples given to doctors at an annual industry cost of $18 billion. And yes, buying lunch for doctors and their staffs are one of the main rites of entry. That makes doctors no different from, say, editors or purchasing agents.
But statistics from inside the industry itself show that if a rep gets to spend just one minute with a doctor, that doctor will write prescriptions for that rep’s drug at a 16 percent higher rate. Give the rep five minutes, and prescriptions increase 52 percent. Since primary-care physicians interact on average 28 times a week with drug sales reps, we’re looking at a huge increase in drug prescriptions that is up for grabs. And none of this is necessarily good for the patient.
In fact, it’s become such a problem that states such as Pennsylvania and South Carolina
have begun hiring their own reps to go out and counteract the pharmaceutical industry’s propaganda. It is worthwhile for them to do this simply to assure better patient outcomes, since newer drugs—the ones being pushed aggressively by the industry—are also the most expensive drugs, but not necessarily the best drugs for the patient. A beneficial side effect is a reduction in the cost of drug subsidies to patients.
Pennsylvania’s “unsales” program, while costing $3 million over three years, has so far saved state programs about $572,000 a year in prescriptions for stomach-acid suppression alone.
For while doctors naively proclaim themselves not for sale, industry figures such as those already quoted indicate they are readily influenced. Just last year a poll published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed 94 percent of doctors reporting “direct ties” to the dug industry.
Alarmed by such figures, some state legislatures have begun to fight back, trying to restrict the industry’s antics, but pharmaceutical companies are aggressive in defense of what they regard as their territory.
For example, New Hampshire passed a law in 2006 prohibiting drug companies from purchasing information about doctors’ prescribing habits. The industry got the law overturned in federal court a year later. Similar laws passed by Maine and Vermont are being challenged in court.
And last year, 17 states drafted legislation to regulate gifts to doctors and require their disclosure.
Not one of those bills became law.
