Tuesday, February 10, 2015

That website John Oliver told you about: how much money Big Pharma has given your doctor?

On This Week Tonight, watch John Oliver eviscerate the stunningly corrupt practices of Big Pharma. This IS journalism. In the piece, he directs people to Open Payments, which is "a federal program that annually collects and makes information public about financial relationships between the health care industry, physicians, and teaching hospitals.

"The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) collects information from manufacturers of drugs and devices about payments and other transfers of value they make to physicians and teaching hospitals. These payments and other transfers of value can be for many purposes, like research, consulting, travel, and gifts. CMS will be making this data publicly available each reporting year.

In other words, in the words of Mark Evanier, "you can look up your doctor and see how much loot he's taken and from whom."

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