Jerry Summers
DISCLAIMER:
(The following reference applies to the very small minority of physicians (like lawyers) who are more interested in financial rewards instead of providing the best independent and professional medical treatment to their patients. I may sometime NEED surgery.)
In August 2025, Volume 31, No. 8 of the eight-page newsletter, “Worst Pills News,” available at www.worstpills.org, an informative article by the physician editor of the Public Citizen (P.C.) publication discusses “The Continuing Problem of Pharmaceutical Industry Payments to Physicians”
P.C. is on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the conservative, “The Patriot Post,” the consumer group that was originally founded by conservator advocate, Ralph Nader, author of the book “Unsafe at Any Speed,” that pointed out the deficiencies of the “Motor in The Rear Chevrolet Corvair.”
The power of drug companies to influence legislation in the halls of Congress and state legislatures is well documented. The number of lobbyists and attorneys employed on behalf of pharmaceutical entities, and their political contribution amounts to elected or aspiring public officials is shocking to many, but is just the “American Way of Doing Business,” to others.
Dr. Robert Steinbrook’s comments in the above cited article, does point out a serious practice that has existed for “more than 30 years” (actually longer) between “Big Pharma” (and little), in the health care area that involves a very small number of money minded physicians who succumbed to the tactic of “the use of speaker programs” to pay kickbacks to doctors to persuade them to prescribe the company’s drugs for the treatment of HIV and AIDS.
In April 2025, one drug provider reached a settlement with the federal government in the amount of $202 million dollars for violations of “Kickback statues”
Other statistics cited in the publications’ 2024 reports indicated that civil and criminal penalties assessed in federal and state settlements against drug manufacturers totaled $62.3 billion dollars in financial penalties, mostly in the area of opioid prescriptions between the years of 1991 to 2021.
In reality, the late Tennessee Senator, Estes Cary Kefauver, earlier addressed the topic in his 1960 expose of monopolistic practices in the drug, auto, steel and bread industries in America that was published by his family after his unexpected death from a heart attack on August 1963.
His 239-page book, “In A Few Hands-Monopoly Power in America” (1965- Penguin Books- Random House), the Tennessean lawyer and politician addresses this and other issues presented in the “administered price hearings” of the Senate Subcommittee on anti-trust and even monopoly all which he presided as chairman from 1957-1963.
In both the1960s and 2024 inappropriate promotional efforts and benefits to encourage doctors to prescribe a company’s drug product under the guise of being “educational in nature,” were raised. Three additional cases are described in the article alleging that one violator in 2022 paid $900 million, another in 2024 agreed to pay $1.5 billion for distributing misbranded medication, and a third agreed to pay $60 million for improper physician payments by a subsidiary company.
(Even recent political legislation enacted in Congress to reduce the cost of some selective medications in 2026, to sick citizens, was undergoing attack by efforts to delay the effective date of said law beyond 2026.)
“DOCTOR RECOMMENDED ON TELEVISION ADS MAY HAVE A DOUBLE MEANING?”
(As mentioned in paragraph 1, the statement is intended to apply to a small minority of physicians who may wind up on the Saturday “American Greed,” cable program on channel 347 in the Chattanooga media market!)
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If you have additional information about one of Mr. Summers' articles or have suggestions or ideas about a future Chattanooga area historical piece, please contact him at jsummers@summersfirm.com)