This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 03 Nov 2007, by Arne Løining.
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10 Nov 07
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One reason the fraud continues is that the fines are seemingly not high enough to stop it. All the resolved lawsuits cost Pfizer less in settlements than the questionable business practices generate in profits. For instance, the $430 million the company paid in May 2004 for its subsidiary's illegal marketing of Neurontin was only about 15 percent of the drug's gross sales of $2.7 billion in 2003. The few billion paid out in recent false claims lawsuits by major firms are seen by the drug companies as "just a cost of doing business," says Shelley Slade, a former Justice Department health fraud attorney who specializes in representing false claims plaintiffs.
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03 Nov 07
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n return, the corporate drug dealers have gotten their money's worth: unbridled profits and lax regulation of both corporate fraud and drug safety.
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while the department apparently diverts as much as $30 million a year allocated to it for fighting health-care fraud to other pet causes.
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There was a deliberate choice with the DRA that it's okay to harm poor beneficiaries -- but they went out of their way to avoid cuts to drug companies."
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even as use of the drug led to suicides and attempted suicides after the manufacturer -- and the FDA -- ignored warnings about its dangers
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94 percent of physicians had some type of explicit relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.
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there was a conscious decision that the pendulum had swung too far towards health-care fraud enforcement.
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The report also found that physicians who took the most payments tended, more often than other doctors, to prescribe to children "atypical antipsychotics" -- a new class of powerful medications -- although none of these drugs have FDA approval for use with kids.
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more supportive of drug industry arguments
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