Jun 2 2010
The Wall Street Journal: "Medical-device maker Medtronic Inc. disclosed that it made payments of more than $15.7 million in royalties and consulting fees to U.S. doctors in the first quarter, the first time the big Minneapolis company has provided such details. In making the voluntary disclosure, Medtronic is stepping ahead of requirements of a new federal law mandating such publication by 2013. But the Medtronic initiative is occurring at a time when federal prosecutors and congressional investigators are increasingly scrutinizing relationships between drug and device companies and doctors." The WSJ reports that almost all of the payments went to orthopedic specialists and orthopedic surgeons, and most of that "took the form of royalty payments for a wide range of doctors' surgical inventions" (Burton, 6/1).
 This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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