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HLS Largest Customers Fined For Overcharging Docters

SHAC | 03.07.2008 20:42 | SHAC | Animal Liberation | Health | World

Big pharma companies make big profits from animal abuse, while causing adverse drug side effects to patients. Their greed knows no bounds and they over charged Medicaid doctors for their drugs. Nice to know that GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Novartis and AstraZeneca et al are not always getting away with their fraudulent ways...

Alabama state court jury, after two days deliberation, has ordered GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis to pay a multimillion dollar settlement to the State for medicaid fraud.

But Novartis said it will appeal a $33 million circuit court verdict that ruled the company overcharged doctors and pharmacists in the Alabama Medicaid Agency.

A jury in the Montgomery County Circuit Court ruled Tuesday that Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline were liable for a total of $114.2 million. Glaxco would be responsible for $81 million while Novartis would have to pay $33 million.

Novartis was among 79 pharmaceutical manufacturers named in a lawsuit filed in 2005 by the Alabama attorney general, claiming that the average wholesale price and wholesale acquisition cost provided by pharmaceutical companies to price reporting services resulted in overpayment to pharmacists and doctors in the state Medicaid system. .

On Feb. 21, 2008 the first of the average wholesale price cases to be tried resulted in a verdict for $215 million against the AstaZeneca pharmaceutical company.

Source: Business Journal, 2nd July.

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