Tuesday, November 10, 2009

First, Do No Harm


First, Do No Harm

Imagine running a scam that earned you $3 billion dollars a year!

Imagine having legal counsel calculating and telling you, ahead of time, that it might take the Feds 3 or 4 years to catch on, and another 2-5 years of court battles to reach the guilty verdict you anticipate. Imagine, knowing that when all was said and done, you were found guilty of a felony, fined $2 billion dollars and no one goes to jail.

Re-cap: on the low end, you earned $11 billion dollars, and you were fined $2 billion dollars; leaving you with a net profit of $9 billion dollars and no accountability.

Question: Would you do it again? Duh!

This pattern of willful criminal behavior has been the norm in the pharmaceutical industry for many years, with one major addition: they are knowingly killing hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people on the way to those windfall profits.

In January of 2009, Lilly pleaded guilty and paid $4.2 billion in fines and penalties to settle charges that it had for at least four years illegally marketed (for off-label use) Zyprexa…Lilly already had a criminal conviction for misbranding a drug when it broke the law again in promoting Zyprexa for off-label use starting in 1999. The medication provided Lilly with $36 billion in revenue from 2000-2008. That’s more than 25 times as much as the total penalties Lilly paid in January.

Companies regard the risk of multi-million dollar penalties as just another cost of doing business.”

Ultimately, BigPharma has an absolute total disregard for patient welfare, or even life, as death is factored into the costs of doing business: First, Make Obscene Profits.

Death is built-in to the price you pay for drugs!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice to see, in print, what I know with my entire being! In the name of greed, many atrocities are being committed. Sadly, healthcare reform will benefit the pharmaceutical complex more than individuals, regardless of what is passed.

lee

docmay said...

lee

you are so right.
check out this story in yesterday’s news:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/11/pharma-deal-with-white-ho_n_353499.html