>>"travel expenses for beachfront junkets where doctors talked up new uses for particular drugs,

Consider that perhaps a wonderful location is a benefit to patients: physicians are not compelled to attend every session and cheerfully will make their way to the beach rather than bolster attendance numbers for lousy content or known sock puppetry. ;-)

Re new uses: AFAICS if there's a new use for a drug that meets standards and satisfies the FDA, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with talking it up at a credible conference where prescribers are gathered. It's not the same as IT where sock puppets can claim all sorts of benefits to try to make sales whether the benefits are real or not: there needs to be evidence of new benefit in healthcare or you can expect to be sued.

>>to investments and other ownership stakes doctors held in companies.

So physicians have investments and ownership stakes in companies, and receive dividends and other profits? I get the argument that physicians owning facilities or companies whose services or products they prescribe can creates a risk, but if you want to create special limits on physicians investing in services or products they believe in, you'll need to compensate them some other way. How?

Seems to me that the are bad apples in medicine because there always are when human beings are involved. Just as there are very good and dilligent people. It ought to be possible to identify and weed out the miscreants without throwing mud at everybody else as well.