Drugging our kids: RX alliance rewards doctors as drug companies get richer

An Investigative report by the Los Angeles Daily News

The following is from a much larger article well worth reading:

An investigation by this news organization has found that drugmakers, anxious to expand the market for some of their most profitable products, spent more than $14 million from 2010 to 2013 to woo the California doctors who treat this captive and fragile audience of patients at taxpayers’ expense.

Drugmakers distribute their cash to all manner of doctors, but the investigation found that they paid the state’s foster care prescribers on average more than double what they gave to the typical California physician.

The connection raises concerns that Hernandez and many other unsuspecting youth have been caught in the middle of a big-money alliance that could be helping to drive the rampant use of psychiatric medications in the state’s foster care system.

“It sucks that the people marketed it that way, but that’s not that shocking. I’m more mad at the doctors for just going along with it,” said Hernandez, 22, who was prescribed as many as four of the drugs at a time as a foster youth in Southern California.

Overall, drugmakers reported payments to 908 doctors — well over half of those who prescribed psych medications to the state’s foster children, according to this news organization’s analysis of prescribing data and four years of pharmaceutical company payments compiled by the public interest journalism nonprofit ProPublica. And those who prescribed the most typically received the most, the analysis found.

The results provide the most comprehensive look to date at the pharmaceutical industry’s influence on the doctors who treat the 60,000 kids in the country’s largest foster care system — a lucrative target because Medi-Cal pays the bill with little scrutiny.

One Sacramento doctor raked in more than $310,000 in four years to give promotional speeches and an extra $8,500 in meals, records show. Another 224 doctors each got more than $500 in meals, and two of them each received more than $20,000 for travel. The biggest payments went for research, with two Southern California doctors each receiving more than $2 million to conduct drug company-sponsored trials.

Doctors who accept the drug companies’ offerings say they aren’t influenced, and the pharmaceutical industry defends its partnerships as a necessity for developing the lifesaving drugs of tomorrow.

“The kind of medical innovation that we have in this country wouldn’t happen without a robust dialogue between industry and physicians,” said John Murphy, assistant general counsel for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

But critics say the drug companies are disguising investments in the name of science to reward doctors who in turn boost the industry’s bottom line.

“These figures suggest these doctors are not looking out primarily for the kids’ interests,” said UCLA social welfare professor David Cohen, who has studied medication use in the foster care system and drug company influence. “They suggest many doctors are looking out for their financial interests, and we should all be wary.”

The findings are especially disturbing because of the growing evidence that psychiatric drugs are being overprescribed to California’s foster children despite their significant side effects, the subject of this news organization’s yearlong investigation “Drugging Our Kids.” The news organization previously reported that almost 1 in every 4 adolescents in California foster care has been prescribed psychotropic medications, often to manage troublesome behavior rather than treat the severe mental illnesses for which they are approved.

While the federal government has cracked down in recent years on how drug companies market powerful antipsychotic drugs to the elderly and children, the industry’s investment in courting doctors appears to still be paying off: California taxpayers spend more on psychotropic drugs than on any other kind of medication prescribed to foster children, according to a decade of Medi-Cal spending data revealed by this news organization in August.

This is only the tip of the iceberg