When doctors take money or gifts from pharmaceutical companies they’re required by law to report that to the U.S. government. But did you know there’s a website where you can look up how much money any doctor in the U.S. has taken from healthcare companies? It’s completely free and run by Medicare.
A new study from JAMA found that 26 of 28 physicians who had given endorsements to healthcare products on the social media platform X had taken at least one payment from the companies making those products, according to news outlet STAT on Thursday. Incredibly, roughly half of the physicians had published no research related to the topics they were endorsing.
But the website for looking up payments to American doctors isn’t just about endorsements. It covers payments involving research, speaking fees, and a host of other areas where doctors receive payment from companies within the healthcare sector. Doctors are supposed to report any kind of compensation, even if it’s just a cup of coffee while the doctor and a drug company representative discuss the latest medications being released.
The website is called Open Payments and is run by the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid Services. And you can type in the name of any doctor in the country to see their latest data. For example, you can plug in any celebrity doctor and see which companies might be giving them money.
Take Dr. Drew, a celebrity doctor whose full name is Drew Pinsky, a man who used to be on mainstream TV all the time with shows like Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew and Dr. Drew on Call. The most recent data for Pinsky is from 2022 and shows that he made a total of $60,000 in five payments that year from Metuchen Pharmaceuticals. Metuchen owns the rights to Stendra, an erectile dysfunction medication, which Pinsky started promoting in a social media-driven campaign, according to a press release from 2022.
As you can see from the screenshot below, the nature of the payment is listed as, “Compensation for services other than consulting, including serving as faculty or as a speaker at a venue other than a continuing education program.” Pinsky didn’t immediately reply to a message sent through his website on Thursday.
To be clear, it’s not necessarily wrong or shady when doctors get payments from Big Pharma companies. Firms that develop new drugs and introduce new medical devices are doing important work. But it can be tremendously useful to know who’s getting paid by whom in every aspect of life. As soon as we take money or gifts from someone, it can influence even the most ethical person’s behavior in sometimes subtle ways.
It’s not just celebrity doctors with data available on the Open Payments website. Every doctor in the country is theoretically in the database and you can search your own doctor to find out what kind of money they’re taking from Big Pharma. The Open Payments website also has a video explaining what you can learn by using this tool.
Frustratingly, not every doctor is diligent about reporting payments they’re receiving from healthcare companies. As STAT’s new article explains, almost half of the 28 physicians in that recent study didn’t report the compensation they’d received for social media endorsements.
Doctors received $12.58 billion in compensation from healthcare companies in 2022, according to the Open Payments website. The site has over 80 million records accounting for $68.44 billion dating back several years.
And, again, none of this is necessarily evidence doctors are doing anything wrong by getting paid. However, the U.S. has the highest healthcare costs in the world while maintaining the lowest life expectancy among all large wealthy countries. It’s reasonable to ask if all the money sloshing around in the healthcare industry is really making any of us better off. Because all of the available evidence suggests it’s actually making us sicker.
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