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A comment on Non-profit’s $300 hepatitis C cure as effective as $84k alternative. Parent comment

Re:Non-profit’s $300 hepatitis C cure as effective as $84k a... by chimeracoder on Thursday April 12, 2018 @10:36AM (#16821346)
> Empirically, I dated a girl for about 2 years who was a sales representative for a major pharmaceutical company. When I asked about her job she said it was mostly dropping of brochures, swag, free lunches, and holding contests to promote products. Top producers (doctors) received all expense paid trips to medical conferences held in exotic locations or were invited to be paid speakers at said conferences. It was not too different from what the marketers did at the insurance broker I worked for at the time to cater Agents to write their lines.

Your anecdote is about which drugs the doctors choose to prescribe. It has nothing to do with incentivizing doctors to prevent patients from filling generic versions of drugs and forcing them to purchase the brand-name version of the same drug, which is what this thread is about.

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Re:Non-profit’s $300 hepatitis C cure as effective as $84k a... by cptskippy on Thursday April 12, 2018 @10:47AM (#16821458)
They weren't compensating them to fill scripts for the generic. She made more frequent visits to top producers based on filled prescriptions. I asked her how she knew who to visit and she said she was emailed regional reports with prescription numbers.

I don't know how those reports are generated. Do pharmacies report that information back to pharmaceutical companies? Are they based off of shipments to regions?

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Re:Non-profit’s $300 hepatitis C cure as effective as $84k a... by chimeracoder on Thursday April 12, 2018 @11:33AM (#16821996)
> They weren't compensating them to fill scripts for the generic.

They're not out there to make sales for old drugs (drugs that have gone generic). They're out there to make sales for new drugs, which don't have generic equivalents at all.

No pharmaceutical company is going to waste money on sales for drugs that have gone generic, and certainly no pharmaceutical company is going to try and incentivize providers to DAW prescriptions. Aside from being already illegal, even an unscrupulous company wouldn't bother because it'd be a tremendous waste of money.

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