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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – On Tuesday, the federal government is expected to release details of payments to doctors by every pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturer in the country, under a provision of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. As ProPublica’s Charles Ornstein, Ryann Grochowski Jones and Eric Sagara report today, it’s not quite clear what the data will show, in part because the first batch will be incomplete, covering spending for only a few months at the end of 2013.
But ProPublica, which has been detailing relationships between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry for the past four years as part of our Dollars for Docs project, has some good guesses — and, in cooperation with the website Pharmashine, new data to report today on doctor payments. <script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://pixel.propublica.org/pixel.js” async=”true”></script>
Highlights from today’s article, co-published with The New York Times’s The Upshot:
- Dollars for Docs now includes 3.4 million payments since 2009, totaling more than $4 billion, of which $2.5 billion was for research. For 2013 alone, there were 1.2 million payments valued at nearly $1.4 billion.
- Surveys show that the number of doctors with at least one type of financial relationship with a drug or medical device company decreased from about 94 percent in 2004 to 84 percent in 2009.
- The biggest companies aren’t always the ones who spend the most. For example, Forest Labs, a midsize drug company, spent $32.3 million on paid talks in 2013, compared with $24.1 million for the much bigger AstraZeneca.
- Ahead of the federal data release, many companies have cut back their spending on promotional speakers.
The full article is here: http://www.propublica.org/
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