700+ American Doctors Given Over $1M Each From Big Pharma To Push Drugs

big pharmaRichard Enos – In a very thorough and revealing analysis of statistical industry payment data, ProPublica disclosed that more than 2,500 physicians have received at least half a million dollars apiece from drugmakers and medical device companies in the past five years alone, while more than 700 of those doctors received at least $1 million, and that doesn’t include money for research or royalties from inventions.

In their article, the authors note that their previous analysis in 2013, which found out that 1 doctor had made $1 million and 21 doctors had made over $500,000 for the same reasons, was expected to be a wake-up call for more effective scrutiny, oversight, and challenges to these payments. Instead, these types of payments have become much more commonplace. Continue reading

How China’s Mobile Ecosystems Are Making Banks Obsolete

Giant Chinese tech companies have bypassed credit cards and banks to create their own low-cost digital payment systems.

paymentsEllen Brown – The US credit card system siphons off excessive amounts of money from merchants, who must raise their prices to cover this charge. In a typical $100 credit card purchase, only $97.25 goes to the seller. The rest goes to banks and processors. But who can compete with Visa and MasterCard?

It seems China’s new mobile payment ecosystems can. According to a May 2018 article in Bloomberg titled “Why China’s Payment Apps Give U.S. Bankers Nightmares”:

The future of consumer payments may not be designed in New York or London but in China. There, money flows mainly through a pair of digital ecosystems that blend social media, commerce and banking—all run by two of the world’s most valuable companies. That contrasts with the U.S., where numerous firms feast on fees from handling and processing payments. Western bankers and credit-card executives who travel to China keep returning with the same anxiety: Payments can happen cheaply and easily without them.

The nightmare for the US financial industry is that a major technology company – whether one from China or a US giant such as Amazon or Facebook – might replicate the success of the Chinese mobile payment systems, cutting banks out. Continue reading