This is the bad kind of statistic, because it doesn't actually tell us anything interesting about the impact on individual doctors (but does sound scary / impressive!).
A Google search says the US has 1 million doctors, so $12B over 10 years is $12k/doctor/year on average - nice, but not wow...
The linked article did actually have something useful to say on a per-doctor basis:"The analysis showed that more than half of physicians received at least one payment, and roughly 94% of payments were associated with one or more marketed medical products. A small percentage of physicians received the largest amounts, often exceeding $1 million".
So: nice but small for most doctors, rather (too?) large for a small percentage.
A Google search says the US has 1 million doctors, so $12B over 10 years is $12k/doctor/year on average - nice, but not wow...
The linked article did actually have something useful to say on a per-doctor basis:"The analysis showed that more than half of physicians received at least one payment, and roughly 94% of payments were associated with one or more marketed medical products. A small percentage of physicians received the largest amounts, often exceeding $1 million".
So: nice but small for most doctors, rather (too?) large for a small percentage.