Tuesday, October 8

Pharma Industry Beware: False Claims Litigation Could Cost Upwards of $300 Million

The pharmaceutical industry discovers, create, products, and markets pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered) in order to alleviate a symptom, cure them, or vaccinate them. The global pharmaceutical market is expected to reach $1.12 trillion by the year 2022.

Since the pharma industry is so essential for the health of billions of people across the world, pharma organizations need to be extremely careful down to the last detail. Even the smallest mistake can result in hundreds of millions of dollars in fines or worse.

According to The National Law Review, a pharma company has agreed to pay a significant settlement to resolve allegations that they illegally made a few years ago to a fund meant to assist Medicare patients taking pulmonary arterial hypertension drugs.

Pharma companies across the U.S. and the globe need to beware in order to avoid ending up like Actelion Pharmaceuticals U.S., Inc., which has to pay as much as $360 million to settle false claims litigations.

The False Claims Act has been fighting government programs fraud since war profiteering during the Civil War.

“Using data from CVC that it knew it should not have, Actelion effectively set up a proprietary fund to cover the co-pays of just its own drugs,” said Andrew E. Lelling, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts. “Such conduct not only violates the anti-kickback statute, it also undermines the Medicare program’s co-pay structure, which Congress created as a safeguard against inflated drug prices.”

Big or small, every organization within the pharma sector needs to avoid false claims issues. Here are some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world:

  1. Johnson and Johnson
  2. Novartis
  3. Roche
  4. Pfizer
  5. Sanofi
  6. Merck
  7. GlaxoSmithKline
  8. AstraZeneca
  9. Bayer
  10. Gilead Sciences

It’s recommended that any business, no matter what industry, avoids false claims issues and similar mistakes. But since the pharma industry is vital to the entire global health sector, complete transparency and accuracy needs to remain at all times.

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