Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17964

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

Drug firm probes its marketing practices: Bristol-Myers eyes Medicaid dealings
Reuters 2003 July 23

Full text:

Drug maker Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. said yesterday it was investigating its own marketing practices to determine whether it violated anti-kickback laws and cheated state-run Medicaid programs out of money.

The company said it could not adequately estimate what it would owe should the matters lead to civil or criminal fines, penalties, or liabilities.

Bristol-Myers is already under investigation on a number of fronts.

The company has admitted that it coaxed wholesalers to buy billions of dollars more of company’s products than they could sell in recent years — thereby artificially boosting Bristol-Myers profit. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating that matter.

The US attorney in Massachusetts is investigating Bristol-Myers and other drug makers about their marketing strategies. The Massachusetts prosecutors have already slapped Schering-Plough Corp. with subpoenas on grants and items of value the company gave insurers and doctors.

Bristol-Myers in January said it would pay $670 million to resolve charges levied by state attorneys general that it unfairly delayed generic competition for its BuSpar anxiety drug and its Taxol cancer treatment at the expense of consumers.

Bristol-Myers’s chief executive, Peter Dolan, last December said he had hired former federal prosecutor Mary Jo White to perform an internal review of the company’s sales practices.

The company was not immediately available to elaborate on its own investigation