The study, published in April in National Bureau of Economic Research, used Medicare claims data and the Open Payments database, which tracks drug company payments to physicians. Researchers analyzed a 20% random sample of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries between 2014 and 2018.
“It does not seem that this payment induces physicians to switch to drugs with a mortality benefit relative to the drug the patient would have gotten otherwise,” study author Colleen Carey, PhD, an assistant professor of economics and public policy at Ithaca, N.Y.-based Cornell University, told NPR.
Patients who were prescribed new cancer drugs did not live longer, but they did not live a shorter amount of time, either, Dr. Carey said.
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