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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15060

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

Edwards J.
More Zyprexa Trouble for Lilly as Insurers Want Money Too
BNET 2009 Jan 21
http://industry.bnet.com/pharma/1000620/more-zyprexa-trouble-to-come-for-lilly-as-insurers-want-money-too/


Full text:

Eli Lilly still faces a ton of legal action on its Zyprexa mismarketing, despite having paid a $1.4 billion settlement recently to state prosecutors and a separate $1.2 billion to settle individual patient plaintiffs.

That leaves insurance companies, who believe they were defrauded out of money when Lilly persuaded doctors to prescribe Zyprexa for patients they should not have – so called “off-label” use. Here’s AmLaw Daily:

There’s another, more complicated suit before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, this one involving insurance companies and other third-party providers who claim they overpaid for Zyprexa prescriptions written by doctors swayed by Lilly’s false marketing of the drug. (The Food and Drug Administration has approved the drug for use only by patients suffering from schizophrenia and serious bipolar disorder.) On Friday the Second Circuit announced that it would review whether that suit is valid, and drug law experts are watching very, very closely.

The issue at stake is whether insurance companies can claim even though they were not the targets of Lilly’s fraud:

The decision didn’t resolve whether a third party with money at stake (such as an insurance provider) could sue an allegedly fraudulent marketer if its complaint is based on a different group (prescribing doctors) making decisions based on the illegal marketing. In other words, can insurance companies sue Lilly even though Lilly didn’t market Zyprexa directly to them?

In theory, judges could rule that some doctors decided to prescribe Zyprexa because they thought it would work, not because they fell for some allegedly fraudulent marketing campaign.

At least one judge is sympathetic to the opposite theory, that third-parties can be defrauded.

There’s a great back story on the whistleblower at the center of this case here.

 

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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