A new settlement in Texas highlights exactly why Americans cannot trust either Big Pharma or the medical industrial complex.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), who is also currently running for Senate, announced the nearly $34 million settlement he obtained from AstaZeneca on June 29 in a press release. Paxton accuses the pharmaceutical giant of engaging in an illegal kickback scheme to influence how often Texas Medicaid providers were prescribing AstraZeneca’s products.
Paxton filed a lawsuit against AstraZeneca under the Texas Health Care Program Fraud Prevention Act. The settlement is in response to the state of Texas’s claims and will help reimburse the taxpayer money paid for prescriptions unfairly influenced.
The press release explained:
Texas’s lawsuit alleged that AstraZeneca provided free nursing services and reimbursement support to prescribers and paid third-parties to deploy nurses and other healthcare professionals to recommend AstraZeneca drugs to medical providers under the guise of non-branded counseling. These inducements were designed to steer providers toward prescribing AstraZeneca’s drugs. In many cases, these prescriptions were covered by Medicaid, resulting in millions of dollars in claims to Texas Medicaid that were tainted by AstraZeneca’s illegal inducements.
“I will not allow Big Pharma to misuse taxpayer dollars to put profit ahead of Texans’ health,” Paxton stated emphatically. “My office will continue aggressively pursuing healthcare fraud to protect taxpayer dollars and the integrity of our healthcare system.” He has been pursuing reports of Medicaid fraud in Texas and uncovered AstraZeneca’s kickbacks scheme. Significantly, he also identified similar schemes from other pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly.
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This is an instance of precisely why I wish the federal government would enforce anti-monopoly laws and stop approving risky drugs from—or lucrative deals for—Big Pharma. And the current administration is as much a problem in this case as the previous administration. The companies that make the drugs are so powerful and immune from consequences that they don’t prioritize customers’ health.
And thanks to policies like Obamacare and Medicare that made the U.S. medical industry pseudo-socialist and corporatized, doctors are much more likely to prioritize bureaucratic recommendations and Big Pharma demands than what truly cures patients. As Goldman Sachs concluded years ago, in 2018, curing Americans instead of hooking them on endless drugs is no longer seen as a sustainable business model. Incidentally, as someone whose doctors have prescribed meds that cause the problems I needed to cure, and who has friends experiencing the same issue, always do your own research on a drug before accepting it from your doctor or provider.
Government healthcare like Medicaid, besides being unconstitutional, doesn’t guarantee high-quality healthcare. It ensures providers and Big Pharma will prioritize profit over patients.
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