Big Pharma Fraud - - Give Them More $?
Our legal team just finished helping our client, pharmacist whistleblower Stephani LeFlore of Minnesota, force her employer, CVS, the largest drug retailer in the country, to pay $17.5 Million of settlement on a Medicaid fraud False Claims Act lawsuit. Ten states and the federal government will be collecting $14,905,000.00 and the rest will be an award to Stephani and her attorneys for leading the government investigators to the fraud and helping them with the case.
This settlement is actually rather small compared to some of the settlements that the big pharmaceutical corporations have been paying. The largest so far has been $2.3 Billion paid by Pfizer for Medicaid and Medicare fraud. The year that Pfizer paid that settlement to the governments, it still showed a profit. In fact, its CEO took home a $15 Million paycheck for his excellent work. Do you get the picture, citizens?
A few years back when Congress added Medicare Part D to pay for prescription drugs on our seniors and disabled citizens, a key part of that law specifically prevented the government from bargaining against the drug corporations to get reduced prices on the drugs. Think about that - - the federal government is the largest single purchaser of drugs in the world, yet the Republican controlled Congress and President Bush, with the help of some Democrats, outlawed our government from bargaining for better prices!
It may get a lot worse. The latest push by the Republican leadership in Congress is to change the Medicare system to have Medicare provide vouchers to beneficiaries that must be used to purchase private health insurance, instead of Medicare simply paying directly for doctor or hospital charges. Medicare currently has an overhead rate of about 4%, while the private health insurers are usually over 30%. That 30% includes the obscene “salaries and bonuses” to CEO’s like Mr. Hemsley of United Health, who recently pulled in $47 Million for 2010. You still don’t get the picture?
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