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“I Want My [Prescription-Drug] Money Back!”
[By Patrick C. Cox; Jr.]
Merck & Company may have to as a result of a recently filed lawsuit in the state of Florida.
Coming on the heels of the disappointing Vytorin™ Enhance Trial results, patient Marion J. Greene, 72, is suing to get her money back. She had been taking Vytorin™ at $100 a month instead of generic cholesterol medications at about one third the costs.
Apparently Ms. Greene feels she hasn’t been getting her money’s worth and claims Merck has misled the public. Although some of her costs were reimbursed, she is seeking a refund of what her attorneys are calling “overpayments.”
Class Action Lawsuit Status Sought
The lawsuit has been filed in Jacksonville and attorneys are seeking class-action status charging Merck & Co. with misleading patients about the effectiveness of Vytorin™.
State consumer protection laws, breach of warranty, and unjust enrichment law violations will form the basis of the charges that Merck overstated Vytorin’s effectiveness vs. generics.
Oversight
The lawsuit certainly will raise more public eyebrows and questions about drug company sales and marketing practices.
You can bet too that Congress will be looking into expanding its oversight as the public demands more accountability. With more awareness and scrutiny physicians cannot afford to be caught in the middle by continuing take drug company promotional claims at face value.
As things heat up MD/DO’s can count on being challenged even more to defend their choices of one medication over the other, or they too could be faced with a patient screaming, “I want my money back!”
Assessment
Has a patient ever cried foul like this to you; if so, what have you done?
Conclusion
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Filed under: Drugs and Pharma | Tagged: Big Pharma and Drugs |
The Leading Business Education Network for Doctors, Financial Advisors and Health Industry Consultants 
Potential Economic “Cause and Effect”
Drug giant and Dow component Merck reported a fourth-quarter net loss of $1.63 billion, or 75 cents per share, a decline from the profit of $473.9 million, or 22 cents per share, it earned in the same quarter a year ago.
The company’s results were slammed by charges related to settlements of lawsuits for its Vioxx painkiller.
Excluding charges related to those settlements, Merck beat Wall Street’s estimates today:
Merck earned 80 cents per share, above the consensus estimate of 74 cents per share.
Merck lowered its 2008 guidance to between $3.80 and $4.00 per share, down from a range of $3.96 to $4.06 per share; this day.
-Ann
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Whistle Blowers
Did you know the Department of Justice [JOD] just reported that Merck & Co. will pay more than $650 million to resolve two whistle-blower lawsuits, one of which was filed by a physician who said substitutions were made to his prescriptions under a pricing agreement with hospitals?
More information on this breaking story is appreciated.
-Editors
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Is the Merck Scandal Growing?
Did you know that two teams of researchers with access to thousands of documents gathered for lawsuits over the painkiller Vioxx™ allege that Merck and Company waged a campaign of deception to promote its drug, moving slowly to warn of possible hazards while at the same time dressing up in-house studies as the work of independent academic researchers?
Yep! Reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association [JAMA] in-effect accuse one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical makers of various forms of scientific fraud.
For example, one such study alleges that Merck and Company gave the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] an incomplete accounting of deaths in a clinical trial of Vioxx™ in patients with mild dementia, while federal regulators eventually received the data, which added to growing evidence that Vioxx™ increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes, according to the Washington Post.
Simultaneously, Merck and Company was using what the JAMA authors called “guest authorship and ghostwriting” to make it appear that research done by its employees or contractors was the work of scientists at medical schools and universities – which presumably gave the findings more credibility when they were published.
Can anyone out-there serve up some more informative dish on this one?
-Ann
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