Industry Payments to Cardiologists Are Associated With Higher Medicare Spending

Industry payments were positively correlated with spending per traditional Medicare beneficiary attributed to a given cardiologist. Although our analysis does not establish causation, the relationship between industry payments and attributed spending is potentially significant, even if industry payments directly influence only a fraction of the overall expenditure. Future studies should better characterize the relationship between payments from device and pharmaceutical companies and spending for those specific devices and drugs and use causal methods to measure the extent to which these payments may influence health care utilization.