The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) maintains a searchable database of payments by pharmaceutical companies to doctors and other healthcare providers at openpaymentsdata.cms.gov. This website allows visitors to enter the name of any physician or other healthcare provider and see what payments have been made to him or her for research, speaking, consulting, food and beverages, and other categories. The website also allows visitors to enter the name of a pharmaceutical or medical device company and see what payments the company has made to healthcare providers. The database is updated annually on June 30th with data for the prior year.
Based on the Open Payments database, the following spreadsheet was created showing the names of 10 major pharmaceutical companies with active speaker programs, the state of their U.S. headquarters, the total amount spent in 2025 in the speaker fee category, the number of payments made, and the calculated amount of the average payment.
Based on an article in Wikipedia titled List of largest biomedical companies by revenue, the annual revenue of the 10 companies with active speaker programs can be estimated. Since some pharmaceutical companies use multiple names, for example, using different names in different countries, the names don’t match exactly. What is noteworthy about the revenue list below is that revenue for 2025 is measured in billions, ranging from 14 to over 65 billion dollars, while speaker fee totals range from 9 to 67 million dollars. It takes 1000 millions to make a billion. Total speaker fees are often one-tenth of one percent of revenue or less. If payments to doctors increase revenue significantly, prosecution for kickback violations might be considered an acceptable risk.
