Two Drugmakers Paid More Than a Quarter Million American Prescribers as Weight Loss Drug Sales Climbed

Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk have made at least one payment to more than a quarter of a million individual doctors and other prescribers in the United States, according to an analysis of federal disclosure data published this week by The Washington Post. The payments run through meals, travel, speaking fees, consulting arrangements, and similar services.

None of this is illegal, and all of it is publicly disclosed. That is the point worth holding onto. The federal Open Payments database exists precisely because Congress decided patients should be able to see financial relationships between drug companies and the clinicians who prescribe. What the analysis documents is the scale of that spending in a drug class that has become one of the largest in American medicine.