House legislators have received gifts to persuade them to oppose the gift ban. Really. They got lots of mugs, with notes inside them subtly asking…”Is it possible a mug, a pen, or a sticky-note pad could influence your vote? We doubt it….” But the New England Promotional Products Association very clearly wanted the House to vote its way, against the gift ban.
But the public agrees with the gift ban. According to A Healthy Blog:
86% of those surveyed believe free dinners (from pharmaceutical companies) should not be allowed
80% believe speaking fees should not be allowed
78% believe free lunches at the office should not be allowed
70% believe free note pads and pens should not be allowed
62% believe free attendance at mandatory continue medical education classes should not be allowed.
And the public thinks there are some other clear lines that should be drawn:
Disclosing payments to doctors from drug companies: 68 percent would support legislation requiring pharmaceutical companies to publicly disclose any gifts or payments given to physicians.
Academic detailing: 71 percent would support legislation that enables clinical experts to provide unbiased non-commercial information about drugs to physicians in their offices.
Clearly, the Pharma industry has some underhanded practices that need to be reformed, and the gift ban (S. 2660) is a good start at rebuilding the public’s trust with Pharma.
So what’s the latest word on whether the ban is passing the House?
fun fact: according to one study, waiters/waitresses whom give candy with their checks receive 18% more tip money than those who don’t
Yes. Candy with your meal check = pharma giving ball point pens.
“The origin of wealth” by Eric D. Beinhocker.
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p>The idea is that humans (regardless of professional occupation) exhibit strong reciprocal behavior. Doesn’t matter if it is candy, pens, mugs, or a trip to Aspen…
How ’bout we ask the MDs and medical professionals if coffee mugs and note pads are coercive marketing tools?
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p>I trust my doctor to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to Rx meds. One man’s brainwashing promotional product is another’s communication device — maybe my MD can learn about a new treatment for me using Lipitor. If it takes a free Pfizer-sponsored luncheon seminar to bring it to her attention, terrific! She’s smart enough to read and understand the results of their “research,” and if she’s skeptical, she’ll disregard the free lunch and throw the technical literature in the trash.
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p>Do progressives think highly trained doctors can be coerced by promotional trinkets? Apparently.
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p>Why are we letting polls drive policy? If that’s the case, 75% of Americans want to drill for oil offshore.
Do the number-crunchers at Big Pharma think gifts can increase the sales of drugs?
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p>Of course, they do.
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p>That’s why Big Pharma gives the trinkets, meals, and “conferences” in Aspen.
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p>If the gifts didn’t increase drug sales, some executive would stop the practice and spend that amount of company money on himself.
How to liberals, businessess are only ruthlessly efficient and effective when it comes to nefarious derring do. When it comes to anything else, they, say, business is incompetent and the government should do it instead.
Having worked for a number of companies, I’ve seen competence and incompetence, efficiencies and waste, and high-mindedness and underhanded dealings, all in different combinations. Just as I have in people. Some companies can be described as just awful while others are great corporate citizens. Most are somewhere in between. You need to look at them on an individual basis. Just like people.
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p>And I’m a liberal.
Dad – in 2004, my local college asked me to be ‘George Bush’ in a debate (there were a plethora of Kerrys!) and this issue came up in the audience.
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p>Affronted med tech described how pharma reps came to doctor’s ofice, and handed out trinkets, and took entire staff out to lunch monthly, and otherwise engaged in ‘coercive’ behavior.
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p>I leaned into the mike and asked her if she attended the lunch and took the trinkets. She replied she did. I then asked her why, if she thought this behavior immoral, did she participate in it and condone it herself.
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p>She sat down in a huff.
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p>Willpower, woman!!!
… decry the game’s rules while in the midst of a match.
While some marketing and advertising fails, it’s generally true that advertising your product will get you more sales.
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p>And, if the Pharma gifts are an inefficiency of the business, then passing the gift ban will have the upside of making Pharma stop wasting money on this.
I’ll assume that marketing does work, in the sense that if a physician is aware of a particular pharmaceutical solution to Problem X, she is more likely to prescribe that solution than if she is unaware of it.
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p>I’m still waiting to hear why this is so bad. In order to so conclude, you must assume that many or most physicians prescribe Drug Y when it is not needed in order to obtain more in the way of note pads shaped like feet. In other words, you must assume that physicians are out to do their patients ill in order to benefit the physician.
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p>I mean, if physicans were that bad, wouldn’t the statehouse be full of them?
without adding in gifts or meals or ski trips.
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p>You’re the first person in this thread to associate the word ‘physicians’ with ‘bad’ in a sentence. The gift ban just establishes a clear line: information about new drugs is fine. Gifts are not.
Reversing conservative framing does not a liberal make. Most liberals would agree that business is very competent…at lining its own pockets. The raison d’être of a business is to make money, and giving out trinkets to inspire loyalty and reciprocity is one way to do it. Pfizer does a good job making cash…and an okay job of improving medical quality of life. See, medical quality of life isn’t Pfizer’s goal, it’s Pfizer’s means to reach their goal of making money. The favors aren’t meant to improve anybody’s health, just the company’s fiscal situation. If they could wake up tomorrow and make more money (after building in transition costs) making dog squeaky toys, that’s what they’d do. Trinket seeding is another example of how good business are at taking care of the bottom line. From Bechtel to Blackwater, we also get a good idea at whose and what expense that profit-maximization comes. Government doesn’t need to up profits to please investors, thus can do the job right. Doesn’t mean they always do, but they certainly have much more motivation.
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p>My introduction to corporate America was as a co-op student at GM while in college. We’d have these weekly meetings with all of the co-ops to teach us about the company. At one (probably the first), we were asked, “Why is General Motors in business?” Of course, everyone answered, “To make cars.” Not at all, we were told, and I’d just need to paraphrase sabutai’s quote above to convey how our misunderstanding was corrected.
… in our system is that by private business having such ability in promoting their interests in the campaign donation arena, they are effectively able to leverage the rules making process. Given the corporate imperative (make money!) it follows that they will (and do) leverage this position in every case where the ‘common’ good is at odds with the corporate mission. Granted that enough bad news about what corporation x does to the ‘common’ good will eventually have a market effect, but all too often the details are in such red tape and the conflicts are under-reported such that the damage is effectively mitigated. This has the effect of turning corporations into ‘externality making machines’. That is, given their incentives, it is in their interest to ‘off-load’ items that would otherwise be the ‘cost of doing business’ to the public. If you can pollute and get away with it, the costs have effectively been transferred to the public. Costs associated with global warming are not found on individual balance sheets… but they are real costs.
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p>We shouldn’t be surprised, of course. This is how we set it up.
Thank you for this important blog. As we creep closer to the end of the session, we also get closer to passing up a great opportunity to reign in excessive and inappropriate marketing practices that increase costs and threaten patient care.
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p>Just as the general public and pharmaceutical companies know that pharmaceutical gifts influence prescribing decisions, so do physicians. A survey published in the American Journal of Medicine found that 84% of physicians believe that pharmaceutical gifts influence their collegues. And, there is a wealth of research and data to back that up – it’s not just conjecture, it’s fact.
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p>That is why over 970 practicing and future MA physicians recently offered their support of the gift ban bill pending in the House (see the letters here – http://www.hcfama.org/index.cf…
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p>Now is the time for the House to join the Senate, and heed calls from the public and doctors alike, in passing the pharmaceutical gift ban.
here’s the right one.
I got an error executing query when I clicked on that.
http://www.hcfama.org/index.cf…