Major Drug Company BUSTED Scamming Tax Payers

Drug giant Pfizer has been fined $24 million dollars in a Medicare fraud kickback scheme – a tiny amount for the multi-billion dollar company. Ring of Fire's Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss this.

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I'm Mike Papantonio back with Farron Cousins on Ring of Fire. Farron of course is the editor of the National Trial Lawyer magazine. Drug giant Pfizer has been fined another $24 million in a Medicare fraud kickback scheme. It's a tiny amount for, it's really a tiny amount for a multi-billion dollar corporation, especially in light of the fact that it happens so routinely with this company.

At some point, you go, okay, you've been fined a billion dollars, you've been fined $300 million. You've been fined $500 million. Whatever it is. Pfizer if you list the companies, okay, top of the list of course is Bayer, Johnson and Johnson, Merck, Pfizer. It's like the same five or six companies that for some reason we won't put them in handcuffs. We just refuse to put them in handcuffs. This is nothing short of theft, okay? They started the ... What they do is they start these foundations. Foundation to improve your kidneys or foundation for kidney disease or foundation for heart disease, and then they get those foundations to run a kickback program through their foundation.

Yeah because it's illegal for any drug company to actively get Medicare to try to prescribe their medication. They set up these foundations, and then the foundation, their job is to work with Medicare and work with doctors to, in this instance, only prescribe Pfizer medications for this group of patients with, whether it's kidney, whether it's liver. Whatever it is, you're only going to work with Pfizer. Technically if this were an independent institution, charitable institution, that would be perfectly legal, and that's also part of the problem here.

Right. Yeah, it is. It is.

Because it was a front group for Pfizer and they were funneling money back through, Medicare patients get ripped off. The taxpayers who fund Medicare, we get ripped off.

Because, here's why they get ripped off. Because it's a kickback scheme. It removes competitiveness when they're going after a drug that will create the same kind of relief for the patient, you see. That's really where the ... In other words, you may have a Pfizer drug and they give a kickback to the foundation and the patient, but even with that kickback, you could buy a cheaper drug that does the same thing. You could buy a generic drug that does the same thing.

These companies, this whole new foundation scheme is huge right now. You know, you got, there's a foundation virtually for everything and this goes on very, very often. Most of the time, it's a foundation that's ... They need the money. These foundations really try to do good work. I mean they really try to get out there and do good work, but they got to have the money. These corporate pigs say, "Well we're only going to give you the money if you do what we want you to do." That's what happens, and there's nothing benevolent about it. It's all about can we increase our cash? Can we increase the money flow here?

$24 million is such, that is nothing. They don't even notice that $24 million is gone when they have to pay that out because they've made hundreds of millions from Medicare and from taxpayers, because again, we're the ones who pay for that, and there could very easily be a different generic available to this patient.

Of course.

But because the doctor can easily write on there no generic substitutes or Medicare can say we're not going to cover generics. We cover only what the script is written for.

Or [inaudible 00:03:46] rules. Inappropriate generic. There's all kinds of things they can get away with.