This month, well-respected national watchdog organization Public Citizen released its study of fraud on the federal government (specifically, those fraud claims pursued by the Department of Justice under the Fraud Claims Act) and found that drug companies overwhelming lead the pack in businesses that have been found to be defrauded the federal government.
From the report itself:
"U.S. spending on prescription drugs has increased from $40 billion in 1990 to $234 billion in 2008. In this era of rapidly rising drug costs, the illegal pharmaceutical company activities that have contributed to such inflated spending have garnered a significant amount of media attention. Recent billion-dollar settlements with two of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, Eli Lilly and Pfizer, provide evidence of the enormous scale of this wrongdoing. However, the total size, varied nature, and potential impact of these illegal and potentially dangerous activities have not been previously analyzed. This study examined trends from 1991 to the present in federal and state criminal and civil actions against pharmaceutical companies in order to address these questions."
And, no surprise to this blog's readers, there are FOUR companies that are responsible for over half of the $20 billion in fraud settlements paid to the feds:
- Eli Lilly
- GlaxoSmithKline
- Pfizer
- Schering-Plough.
In fact, one out of ever four dollars collected in fraud settlement proceeds came from Big Pharma, and these drug companies are just having somewhat of a free-for-all it seems: the study went back to 1991, but it's been within the last 5 years that 75% of that money has been paid.
Which may tie into another revelation from the Public Citizen study: it's been within the past five years that 73% of these cases have been pursued.
By on December 30, 2010 9:28 PM
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