Monday, June 16, 2008

Naughty Pharma Tricks

[Welcome Industry Radar readers!]
Your tax dollars at work:
At first glance, this seems harmless enough: swapping one pill-form for another, assuming the formulations were equivalent. But it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see that the whole point of the swap was to generate megabucks for the provider, at the expense of the taxpayer (i.e. you and me). And how much, exactly, did this little switcheroo cost us?
How about over a million dollars, in one year, just in Florida.
That's a lot of little pills...er, capsules. And it wasn't just for Zantac, either (although this story sure is giving me a heartburn): "generic Prozac (fluoxetine) for depression, and generic Eldepryl (selegiline) for Parkinson's," all were part of this little money-maker.
Of course, Walgreen's denies they did anything untoward (and they're apparently not the only big pharmacy chain with their hand in the cookie jar:
"CVS and Omnicare quietly settled similar cases coughing up $86 million more."
That's a lot of pills. Capsules. Whatever.
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