Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15202
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
Jones A.
Are Doctors the Next Targets in Battle Against Kickbacks?
The Wall Street Journal Law Blog 2009 Mar 4
http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/03/04/are-doctors-the-next-targets-in-battle-against-kickbacks/
Full text:
Surgeons take note: the feds are on their way.
According to this piece in Wednesday’s NYT, officials plan to file charges against a number of surgeons who they allege demanded consulting gigs from device makers in exchange for using their products.
“What we need to do is make examples of a couple of doctors so that their colleagues see that this isn’t worth it,” said Lewis Morris, chief counsel to the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, to the NYT. “We want to send the message to the physician community – particularly surgeons – that you can’t do this.”
According to the Times, federal authorities have fought illegal kickbacks between industry and doctors for years. But rarely have doctors been the targets of such fights, largely because prosecutors believed that juries would sympathize with respected doctors.
The move against doctors is part of a widening campaign to stem questionable industry marketing tactics. In January, Eli Lilly announced it would pay a record fine of $1.4 billion to settle federal criminal charges that it illegally marketed Zyprexa (pictured), a medicine used to treat schizophrenia. Two weeks later, Pfizer announced that it had set aside $2.3 billion to pay an expected fine over charges that it illegally marketed a painkiller called Bextra.
Michael J. Sullivan, the United States attorney for Massachusetts, said that prosecutors, after tasting some success against companies, realized that they needed to expand the scope of their targets. Said Sullivan: “I have been shocked at what appears to be willful blindness by folks in the physician community to the criminal conduct that corrupts the patient-physician relationship.”
