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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20530

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

US govt sues Novartis for health care fraud
The Indian Express 2013 Apr 24
http://m.indianexpress.com/news/us-govt-sues-novartis-for-health-care-fraud/1106948/


Full text:

The US government has sued Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp, claiming it gave kickbacks to pharmacies to switch kidney transplant patients from competitors’ drugs to its own.

The civil health care fraud lawsuit in US District Court in Manhattan seeks unspecified damages and civil penalties for a scheme that the government said has been carried out since 2005.

US attorney Preet Bharara said that the company used the “lure of kickbacks disguised as rebates” to turn 20 or more pharmacies into a sales force for its drug, Myfortic.

He said the company’s actions caused the public to pay tens of millions of dollars for kickback-tainted drugs dispensed by pharmacists who had buddied up to Novartis.

Bharara said Novartis is a repeat offender, having settled fraud charges based on kickbacks less than three years ago. Novartis said in a statement that it disputes the claims and will defend itself.

It said the investigation into the company’s interactions with specialty pharmacies related to the handling of Myfortic had been previously disclosed.

“As a leading healthcare company, Novartis strives to achieve high performance with high integrity. NPC is committed to high standards of ethical business conduct and regulatory compliance in the sale and marketing of our products,” the company said.

In its lawsuit, the government said Novartis had disguised kickbacks as performance rebates and discounts to convince pharmacies to switch patients to Myfortic from competitor’s drugs and to oppose the use of a cheaper, generic immunosuppressant drug.

The government said Novartis offered one pharmacist in Los Angeles a “bonus” rebate amounting to several hundred thousand dollars to induce the pharmacist to “shoulder the burden” of switching 700 to 1,000 transplant patients to Myfortic.

According to the lawsuit, Novartis found it was highly profitable to pay pharmacies even 10 percent to 20 percent kickbacks in exchange for switching transplant patients. The government said the arrangement violated the federal anti-kickback statute prohibiting the offer or payment of rebates and other inducements to cause the purchase of any drug or service covered by Medicare, Medicaid or other healthcare program.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909