Greedy Trial Lawyer
Demand A Free Lunch At Your Pharmacy
Category: Why Didn't I Think Of That?
The next time you fill a prescription I suggest you demand a free lunch. The New York Times is reporting that free lunches are being provided to doctors and their staffs as an inducement to prescribe certain drugs. Why not eliminate the middle man and enjoy the lunch yourself. If you use really expensive drugs I believe a dinner may be in order. If this works you will be eating your way to better health. And, getting a much better deal on your medications.
Drug Makers Pay for Lunch as They Pitch
Anyone who thinks there is no such thing as a free lunch has never visited 3003 New Hyde Park Road, a four-story medical building on Long Island, where they are delivered almost every day.Free lunches like those at the medical building in New Hyde Park, N.Y., occur regularly at doctors' offices nationwide, where delivery people arrive with lunch for the whole office, ordered and paid for by drug makers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Like the "free" vacation that comes with a time-share pitch attached, the lunches go down along with a pitch from pharmaceutical representatives hoping to bolster prescription sales. The cost of the lunches is ultimately factored in to drug company marketing expenses, working its way into the price of prescription drugs.
Doing business over lunch is a common practice in many fields, but drug makers have honed it to perfection, particularly since 2002, when the drug industry adopted a new code banning many other free enticements -- golf outings, athletic tickets, trips and lavish dinners for doctors. The code gives approval to modest meals in the course of business. And conventional wisdom in both the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession is that a lunch is too small to pose an ethical problem. But a growing number of critics say that even those small lunches should be banned.
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