Now that the top/main instigator of all this crime Vasella is out (and being investigated already by both Swiss and USA authority) the others should follow soon. Then maybe, just maybe the new way (as Novartis means) of doing biz will emerge. But what can happen, that the new way may in fact be worse than the old. For those who remember how all the exposed misconducts were handled, remember that they covered those up, fired the whistleblowers (in any), kept and often promoted the instigators/protagonists and then came up with new and improved ways to loot the public and everyone else.
We need a revolution in biz and elsewhere.
“Kickback schemes like those alleged in this case not only call into question the integrity of individual medical decisions, but they also raise the cost of health care for all of us,” Stuart F. Delery, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division, said in a press release. “Patients deserve care based on a doctor’s sound medical judgment, not the doctor’s personal financial interest.
“The Department of Justice will continue to pursue companies that use improper incentives, like those alleged here, to promote their products.”
“As alleged, Novartis corrupted the prescription drug dispensing process with multi-million dollar ‘incentive programs’ that targeted doctors who, in exchange for illegal kickbacks, steered patients toward its drugs,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara said in the release. “And for its investment, Novartis reaped dramatically increased profits on these drugs, and Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal healthcare programs were left holding the bag, doling out millions of dollars in kickback-tainted claims.
“Healthcare fraud imposes tremendous costs and causes great harm to an already burdened healthcare system, and the government will not tolerate it. The widespread kickback fraud alleged in our two lawsuits against Novartis — which only a few years ago settled a False Claims Act case involving violations of the Anti-Kickback Statute based on illegal payments to doctors — makes us question whether Novartis is getting the message.”
In the complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, the DOJ claims Novartis “systematically violated the Anti-Kickback Statute,” which prohibits the payment of remuneration to induce referrals of items or services covered by Medicare, Medicaid, and other federally-funded programs.
It claims Novartis violated its own internal policies concerning speaker programs, which require that the programs have an educational purpose and that slides about the company’s drugs be presented. Novartis violated the Anti-Kickback Statute by paying doctors to speak about certain drugs, including its hypertension drugs Lotrel and Valturna and its diabetes drug Starlix, at events that were often little or nothing more than social occasions for the doctors. The payments and lavish dinners given to the doctors were, in reality, kickbacks to the speakers and attendees to induce them to write prescriptions for Novartis drugs.
The DOJ says that, in many instances, Novartis made payments to doctors for purported speaker programs that either did not occur at all or that had few or no attendees, and thousands of programs were held all over the country at which few or no slides were shown and the doctors who participated spent little or no time discussing the drug at issue.
As a result of its actions, Novartis caused the submission of numerous false claims for drugs to federal health care programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE and the Department of Veterans Affairs health care program, resulting in millions of dollars in reimbursements, according to the DOJ.
