When you see a doctor, you place your health and faith entirely in their hands. You must believe that every decision, especially about prescribed medications, serves your best interest. However, doctors can shatter this fundamental trust when they accept payments from pharmaceutical companies.
This alarming conflict of interest can improperly influence prescribing decisions, directly leading to medication errors, misprescribing and serious patient injury. These dangerous actions are frequently the basis for a medical malpractice claim.
How do conflicts of interest influence care?
Drug manufacturers offer physicians various forms of financial compensation. These are not small, harmless perks. Payments can include:
- Cash for speaking and consulting
- Luxury travel and accommodations
- Expensive meals and entertainment
In exchange, some doctors shift their prescribing patterns. They may favor their benefactor’s drug, which might be costlier, less effective, or less appropriate for your condition than a different, established alternative.
This self-serving behavior can place you in immediate danger, especially when receiving the wrong drug or an unnecessary drug, which can significantly increase your risk of dangerous side effects and harmful medication errors.
Legal and ethical violations
Accepting kickbacks to prescribe a medication is deeply unethical. It also often violates major federal laws, such as the Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS), which prohibits health care providers from exchanging anything of value to encourage the referral of business payable by federal programs, such as Medicare or Medicaid, and is supplemented in Illinois by state laws that address kickbacks in relation to all insurance claims.
When a doctor’s compromised decision to prescribe a specific drug results in provable injury, it represents a breach of their professional duty of care. This failure to meet the accepted standard of care, when it is the proximate cause of a patient’s injury and resulting damages, constitutes medical malpractice. You have a right to competent medical care, and that care must remain uninfluenced by a doctor’s outside financial motives.
Holding medical professionals accountable
You can check whether your health care provider receives money from drug companies using government transparency tools, such as the Open Payments database. This federal resource allows patients to research financial ties between drug companies and doctors. If you or a loved one in the Chicago area has suffered harm due to a medication error or unethical prescribing, you must investigate.
You need to know if financial gain corrupted your care. Obtaining skilled legal representation is essential to clearly understand the complex evidence and the interplay between a doctor’s breach of the standard of care and related regulatory and anti-kickback statutes, such as the Illinois Insurance Claims Fraud Protection Act and the Illinois Health Care Worker Self-Referral Act.