>>Reich puts it well:
>>"Doctors claim these payments have no effect on what they prescribe. But why would drug companies shell out all this money if it didn’t provide them a healthy return on their investment?"
Really?
The author's thrust is against big pharma's strategies to keep prices high in the US, with the proposal that there is more of a place for government. You heard that here first. ;-) Those who like to blame presidents can check out the implications of the Part D machinations under a previous president, fwiw.
Re the issue of payments to doctors- he says the biggest payments are for products doctors helped develop or for speaking fees- and then asks why pharma would pay these fees.
Perhaps because that's the way it works. I once met a man who retired in his early 40s because he got paid a fraction of a cent for every plastic coathanger sold in the Western world. He came up with something to do with the hanger piece and and protected the IP. That's the way it goes until the patent expires, as it will have by now. And speaking fees- I've had my costs covered to present at conferences. So what. The audience can decide whether that makes me beholden. If it did, it's a dead end because few physicians will want to honor a speech by a sock puppet by turning up. The beach beckons.
"... They ne'er cared for us
yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act
established against the rich, and provide more
piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain
the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and
there's all the love they bear us."
-- Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Act 1, scene 1