Quote:
Originally Posted by CoryB
Specialists are just as much in this game is any other doctor. It is often easier for them to be targeted directly by pharmaceutical companies though, ie we are having a conference for all the specialists about the latest developments in the field you are treating. It happens to be occurring in some warm, sunny, beach resort in the middle of winter. Your costs are fully paid if you attend the timeshare style presentation on our latest drugs for this specific area. The costs for that five-start resort conference are then baked into the pharmaceutical company's budget as a "marketing expense" for the drug and included in the crazy cost that patients end up having to pay for non-generic drugs. There are actually some drug therapies which are covered by our tax dollars that approach people's entire salaries and we aren't talking end of life cancer type treatments but things that people could be on for years.
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Yeah, for sure. But I was really talking more at the retail level. Specialists are always prescribing, but they're also doing research and follow-up care and hospital rounds and all that stuff that takes time away from being able to prescribe! When you're running a basic clinic, it's all about patient flow. Each doctor needs to write ~25-30 scrips per day and there are 3 physicians on staff. And that number fluctuates with the overhead of the clinic and the deal with the pharmacist, but that's generally the gist. The Pharmacist is then paid on the dispensing fee and the rebates from the manufacturers which is both higher for generic drugs and based on a percentage of total sales. That's why the kickbacks are important - the pharmacist is beholden to the volume of scrips in few different ways. And this is most easily accomplished when you can have basic maladies being churned through and addressed quickly with some form of antibiotic or otherwise easily dispensed pharmaceutical and the cash register rings. This is sort of why you see the pharmaceutical industry pushing for more integration of nurse practitioners into the basic clinical structure - they can do the same thing and demand much less.
It drives the way in which most clinics structure their practices these days. And you'd be surprised how many hundreds of thousands of dollars can emanate from a 500 square foot pharmacy in a busy walk-in clinic. Many.