sounds like a good case for whistleblowing
When I started working professionally, I always thought that eventually the best product wins. Then I was struck with this kind of reality, where the product with the biggest people network wins.
Similar thing ended up being true for me. Without a good support network, I won't end up anywhere even if I have above average abilities.
With instruction sets in particular, there is a very large amount of inertia.
The most obvious and legal form of kickbacks is just regular sales process that involve a lot of nice dinners or even trips to conferences on nice resorts. One of my old boss owned his company and it was so normal for him to go out for 4 hour lunches with clients.
https://www.frierlevitt.com/articles/service/pharmacylaw/pha...
> Last month, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a $39 million settlement agreement with pharmaceutical company, Daiichi Sankyo, Inc., resolving allegations that the company submitted false claims to federal healthcare programs by paying kickbacks to physicians to induce them to prescribe drugs. The DOJ alleged that Daiichi violated the Anti-Kickback Statute by disguising kickbacks as legitimate business engagements. Specifically, Daiichi engaged physicians as participants in various speaker programs, offering honoraria, payments, meals and other remuneration in return for the physicians’ services. The settlement agreement highlights the following activities which the DOJ found particularly offensive:
> 1. Honoraria was paid where recipient spoke only to members of his or her own staff in his or her own office.
> 2. [...]
A quick anecdote - my wife used to volunteer at a clinic in Chinatown. The doctor always get invites for lunch/dinner from medicine companies and she'd sometimes invite my wife to attend. I was extended an invite to one of them (the doctor knows me via my wife). It was hosted by a rep from Sanofi for the staff of the entire clinic (about 6 people) plus their SOs (including myself and the doctor's husband). There were a total of ~10 people at the dinner and the doctor gets to pick the restaurant so she picked one of the most expensive hotpot restaurants in Chinatown. We ordered lots of grade A beef slices and other expensive goodies. The rep, who is white, curried favors with the doc and the nurses/staff members all evening (to the point that I felt cringe at one point when she says something like this to an asian nurse, "I really like your Asian skin and hair; it's so smooth and glowing"). My estimate is that the dinner bill came out to at least $2000. That dinner, according to the doctor, happens every year with this particular company. Of course, I had to sign on a sheet (roll-call if you will) to acknowledge that I attended the dinner (I presume it's for the rep to reclaim expenses). I can only imagine how much/many drugs from Sanofi that the doctor is prescribing to her patients throughout the year.
Another anecdote - my host-family mom is a psychiatrist (the doctor type; not the other psychiatrist kind). She worked for a private mental institution near Philadelphia. There, they have about 20 mentally-challenged patients, 4-5 nurses and my host-family mom. I have accompanied her to there a couple of times and spent ~6 hours while she was touring and meeting with the patients. Both times, a rep from a medicine company brought lunch for the host-family mom and all the staff. Once was just pizza. Another time was some sort of sandwich and stuff. According to my host-family mom, that's pretty typical and they have about two or so such lunch from medicine company reps every week.
Lots of actual doctors on HN. It's true, pharmaceutical companies do market directly to doctors. The most positive form of marketing for patients is when they provide doctors with free samples of drugs they were going to prescribe anyway.
In my country generic drugs are not always the most reliable option and having more trustworthy alternatives really helps. This isn't drug marketing speaking either, there have been actual newsworthy scandals involving "mismanagement" of taxpayer money meant to pay for the production of basic hypertension drugs.
In the US, a psychiatrist is a medical doctor, MD or DO. The other kind is a psychologist, who are not medical doctors, and can only prescribe in a small number of states.
It also complies with law as long as the entire staff have access to the same perks as the doctor.
Morally ambiguous, but certainly within the law.
I can tell you most rank and file really love this
Let them feel like they're getting something special and you can roll the safe out the front door.
Reps can pay for dinners where clinical presentations are made (educational events). Budgets are supposed to be capped and reasonable. Non-physicians are not allowed to attend.
Not saying your story isn’t true, just saying there are already rules around not doing those things.
Oh, and your sign in sheet will record how much was spent on your meal and it’s should be on the Sunshine Act website that is publicly accessible.
"how physicians prescribe medicines" is in my opinion a bit shitty way to describe it to be honest, because there's also the whole scale from outright fraud and pushing addiction, all the way to offering a specific type of what would be prescribed anyway. (With pharmacies offering substitutes and generics)
There are also regions which try to counteract this with, for example, forcing prescriptions to list the active ingredient rather than a brand of medication. (with fun sideeffects like meningitis vaccine taking ~6 lines to describe)
"We have serious problems with pharma influence" - yes. "how physicians prescribe medicines" - unless you qualify that with more information - it's FUD.
[citation needed] [details needed]
Sure, there is some effect and there is high influence over specific doctors (https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/9/e016408 for a good start). But the sweeping generalisations are not the quality of contents I expected here.
It should not be surprising that doctors choose the path of least resistance: they go with the salesperson that came to meet them for lunch
Yes, smaller companies will still blatantly break the law sometimes, but it’s rare versus decades ago where “perks” were business as usual.
We would hear that this or that product was forced on us because this or that senior executive's friend/relative owned the company producing that product.
Fighting against having to use crappy tooling because of this was one of the nuisances that we'd have to deal with a few times a year.
maybe it is a location-based hatred distribution?
"Kail set up a corporation to receive bribes from Netflix contractors, the DOJ said."
Super blatant. I don't get how he expected to get away with it? You'd think there's a fair chance his employment contract at Netflix would prohibit having an outside interest like this. Plus you know, maybe learn how brown paper bags work. Or find a relative who has a consulting business to bill. Maybe read what cryptocurrency is. Seems like there are a lot of things you could do that aren't making a separate company which has bank accounts and files returns. Oh yeah and don't buy a house with it, a house can be confiscated.
Anyway he should have read the newspapers more. Clearly the thing to do is like your CTO or how politicians do it, just get them to pay you with a "job" after you leave. Perhaps he just hadn't reached scale yet like you can with political roles. Those £38B we spent on track & trace here in the UK will surely come back to the right pockets somehow.
But the one case with the CTO who took a leading position at the vendor he was promoting, that was something. It happened almost 9 years ago now.
It's a fun story that me and my friends still laugh about and refer to whenever similar situations come up. But I'm not prepared to push the whole whistleblower agenda in this case. Feels like throwing rocks at a hornets nest for no reason other than principal.
Do most companies have this?
If it puts the company at just PR risk, varies by company whether they will do anything or participate in the cover up.
Some higher up, either the CTO, CIO, or close to those roles, gets a pamphlet about some shitty product. And without listening to anyone buys it and forces all us techs to use it for a year or two before they move on to the next shitty product.
In one case we even had a CTO force a shitty product on us, speak very highly about it, only to quit and take a position at the vendor of the shitty product.