Conflicts of Interest or Bribes? - Biomet, Smith & Nephew Settle

More justifications of physicians' and other health care professionals' financial arrangements with industry have been appearing in the media and the medical literature (for recent examples, look here and here). Most commonly, the relationships they defended could be characterized as health care professionals consulting or sitting on advisory boards for industry, or receiving royalties from industry for their intellectual property.

In the last two months, two device manufacturers, Biomet and Smith & Nephew, accepted penalties for less defensible financial relationships with physicians. They entered into deferred prosecution agreement and settled charges that they bribed doctors employed by foreign governments. Some of these relationships, especially those involving Biomet, would have been prospectively indistinguishable from the sorts of conflicts of interest that have been so fervently defended.

Background

Starting in 2007, we posted (here, here, here, here and here) about the payments, often huge, that five manufacturers of prosthetic joints, Biomet, DePuy Orthopaedics,a unit of Johnson & Johnson, Stryker Orthopedics,a unit of Stryker Inc, Zimmer Holdings, and Smith & Nephew, revealed they made to orthopedic surgeons and various academic and other organizations in the US. All companies except Stryker were charged with "criminal conspiracy to violate anti-kickback laws," and all were subject to deferred prosecution agreements.  (Stryker entered into a voluntary compliance agreement.)  According to a US Department of Justice news release, the agreements required:

• A federal monitor will be in place at each company to review compliance with the DPAs and NPA and all new and existing consulting relationships with the companies;
• Each company is required to conduct a needs assessment to determine the reasonable needs for educational consulting services, and new product-development consultants.
• All new consulting agreements shall require physicians to disclose their financial engagements with any company to their patients and require the companies to disclose the name of each consultant and what they have been paid on the company website.

These agreements ended in 2009.

The Latest Settlements

As we noted, in 2011, Johnson and Johnson admitted its subsidiaries, including DePuy, had been bribing doctors in Europe through 2007, and agreed to yet another deferred prosecution agreement.

Smith & Nephew

Last month, Bloomberg reported:

Smith & Nephew Plc, Europe’s biggest maker of artificial hips and knees, agreed to pay $22.2 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission that it engaged in a scheme to pay bribes in Greece.

Smith & Nephew admitted in filings today in federal court in Washington that two of its units were involved in a scheme for more than a decade to make 'illicit payments' to doctors employed by government hospitals or agencies in Greece in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The London-based company, which entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S., agreed to pay a $16.8 million fine to settle the criminal allegations and another $5.4 million to settle a civil suit filed by the SEC.

The colorful specifics were:

Smith & Nephew admitted that from 1997 until June 2008, its U.S. and German units bribed public doctors in Greece to win business. The bribes were paid through a person described in court documents as a 'Greek distributor.' This person used shell companies that masked bribes as 'marketing services,' according to the statement of facts filed in the criminal case.

The document cites a March 2002 e-mail from the Greek distributor to a Smith & Nephew vice president in Memphis, Tennessee, complaining that the 'marketing services' payments weren’t enough, noting that competitors were paying 30 percent to 40 percent more.

'I absolutely need this fund to promote my sales with surgeons,' the distributor said in the e-mail, according to prosecutors.

Reforming a corrupt and dysfunctional public health system was one of the conditions of Greece’s acceptance of a European Union and International Monetary Fund bailout package in 2010. Doctors also supplement their income with payments from patients, called 'fakelaki,' small envelopes with cash for prompt treatment.

In the SEC complaint, the payments made to the physicians were described as "commissions."
Note that the company made the usual sort of statement,

'We have what I believe to be a world-class compliance program, having enhanced it significantly since this investigation began in 2007,' Olivier Bohuon, Smith & Nephew’s chief executive officer, said in a statement. 'These legacy issues do not reflect Smith & Nephew today.'

He did not mention why the payments were continuing at a time when the company was already supposedly operating under the previous deferred prosecution agreement that arose out of the charges in the US discussed above.

Biomet

This week, the Indianapolis Star reported,

To sell its products abroad, medical device maker Biomet at times bribed doctors with cash, travel and meals, the federal government says.

The Warsaw, Ind.-based company agreed Monday to pay nearly $23 million to settle allegations that its payments to doctors violated the federal Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The Securities and Exchange Commission alleges that Biomet, acting through four subsidiaries and its distributors, paid bribes from 2000 to 2008 to doctors in Argentina, Brazil and China in order to win business.

The settlement includes a $17.3 million criminal fine and $5.6 million to the SEC, the government and company said in separate news releases.

The details were,

he SEC accused Biomet of writing phony invoices to cover kickbacks as high as 20 percent of sales to push its products.

In other instances, Biomet provided doctors with money and travel in exchange for implanting artificial joints and other Biomet products in their patients, says the SEC complaint, which was filed in federal court in Washington. In China, Biomet vendors gave doctors cash upon completion of surgeries using Biomet implants, the lawsuit says.

'I've got to send him to Switzerland to visit his daughter,' a Biomet distributor wrote in a 2001 email to the company, describing a trip given as a reward to a Chinese doctor who implanted 10 Biomet hips and knees a month in patients.

The SEC said Biomet's compliance and internal audit functions failed to stop the practices even after determining they were illegal.

Note how Biomet accounted for the payments,

The payments were falsely recorded on company books as 'commissions,' 'royalties' and 'scientific incentives,' the Justice Department said.

Furthermore, the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette added,

With the settlement announced Monday, the Justice Department found that Biomet and its subsidiaries covered up bribery payments by officially recording them as 'consulting fees' or 'commissions.'

Note that Biomet's official response was similar to Smith & Nephew's, as reported in another article from the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette,

Jeffrey Binder, Biomet’s president and CEO, didn’t address the company’s guilt or innocence in a written statement released Monday.

Biomet has 'significantly enhanced' its procedures worldwide in recent years to ensure employees’ conduct is legal and ethical, he said.

'Moving forward, we intend to continue to adhere to our enhanced global compliance procedures, and to promote the company’s commitment to the highest ethical standards in all the markets that we serve,' Binder said.

Again, he did not explain why this time the enhanced compliance procedures are likely to work, given that the questionable conduct was still going on after the company had already entered into the 2007 deferred prosecution agreement.

Summary

Some Apparent Conflicts of Interest are Actually Bribes

In these cases, two medical device corporations paid doctors in several countries for implanting their products into patients. The resulting legal proceedings allow us to characterize these actions as bribes. Clearly both the companies' and the physicians' actions were unethical, since they lead to decisions that put the enrichment of the decision makers and those bribing them ahead of the patients' interests.

Some of the most common financial arrangements between health care professionals and industry that are thought of as conflicts of interest are paid consulting and payment of royalties for intellectual property. As we have discussed, e.g. here, conflicts of interest in medicine and health care are generally thought to raise the likelihood of corruption, but not necessarily to indicate corruption in specific instances. In the cases above, bribes were sometimes called "consulting payments or royalties." This suggests that some consulting payments and royalties which may commonly be thought of as conflicts of interest are outright bribes, that is, outright health care corruption.

Those who fervently defend conflicts of interest as inevitable, and necessary for collaboration and hence innovation (e.g., look here), often minimize the adverse effects of these conflicts (e.g., look here). In fact, any putative benefits of such conflicts ought to be contrasted with their possible harms. These cases make it clear that these harms include outright corruption which may be disguised as mere conflicts of interest.

This adds strength to arguments that conflicts of interest ought to be minimized or eliminated, not tolerated and "managed."

Current Measures to Enforce Laws Against Bribes and Kickbacks are More Theatre than Deterrent

The current cases are just the latest members in the march of legal settlements. We have noted that misbehavior in large health care organizations rarely leads to any negative consequences for the people who authorized, directed or implemented the offending actions. Instead, the penalties are, at most, fines paid by the organizations, not the people involved, and variants of deferred prosecution and/or corporate integrity agreements. We and others have previously argued without negative consequences affecting the people who authorize, direct or implement unethical actions, such actions will continue.

The current cases corroborate this. Corporations that had already paid fines and accepted deferred prosecution agreements for bribes to physicians continued to bribe other physicians. The failure of the offending corporations to admit any wrongdoing, or the need for specific changes of behavior in the future, suggests that the current fines and deferred prosecution agreements will not be any more effective than the previous ones. The current fashion of punishing behavior within health care organization with fines and agreements to behave better in the future appears to be more law enforcement theatre than serious deterrent.  

As we have said before, true health care reform would make leaders of health care organization accountable for their organizations' bad behavior.

Another Month, Another Set of Legal Settlements, Deferred Prosecution Agreements, and Jury Findings Adverse to Large Health Care Corporations

Another month, another series of adverse legal rulings suggesting misbehavior by large health care organizations.  In alphabetical order,...

Baxter, McKesson, Teva Pay Punitive Damages

As reported by Bloomberg,

A jury said Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. unit and two other drugmakers must pay $162.5 million in punitive damages for selling the anesthetic Propofol in a way that led three colonoscopy patients to develop Hepatitis C.

Jurors in state court Las Vegas ordered Teva Parenteral Medicines Inc., Baxter Healthcare Corp. and McKesson Corp. to pay so-called punishment damages over sales of the anesthetic in vials large enough to be reused by doctors. Anne Arnold, Richard Sacks and Anthony Devito contend they contracted Hepatitis C from reused vials during colonoscopy procedures. They had sought more than $700 million in damages.

It’s the second punitive award against Baxter and the unit of Petach Tikva, Israel-based Teva over a 2008 hepatitis outbreak in Nevada tied to Propofol. The first case resulted in a punitive verdict of more than $500 million against the drugmakers. Teva has agreed to cover all damage awards arising from the Nevada cases on behalf of Baxter and McKesson.

In particular,

The patients’ lawyers allege Teva intentionally sold Propofol in jumbo-sized vials to encourage doctors to reuse them, even with the risk of spreading blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis, an incurable liver disease.

So the allegations are that the company intentionally put financial gain ahead of the safety of patients.

Boston Scientific Settles Over-Billing Allegations

Again per Bloomberg:

Boston Scientific Corp.’s Guidant LLC unit will pay $9.25 million to settle a whistleblower’s claim that the company over-billed the U.S. and private hospitals for heart pacemakers and defibrillators.

The details:

Guidant allegedly reneged on credits owed to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for replacement of units still under warranty and is accused of over-charging hospitals for the devices, causing them to over-bill Medicare, according to an e-mailed statement from the Justice Department.

Note that we have quite a extensive files on Boston Scientific, and on Guidant, now its subsidiary.

Hil-Rom Settles Fraud Allegations

Reported by the Knoxville News-Sentinel:

Federal prosecutors announced Tuesday a $41.8 million civil fraud settlement in a 'whistle-blower' lawsuit against international medical equipment supply company, Hill-Rom Company Inc.

The results also were that

As part of the settlement, Hill-Rom has entered into a five-year 'corporate integrity agreement,' in which the firm will face close scrutiny by federal officials, Killian said.

The allegations were:

'Hill-Rom submitted false claims for medical equipment for patients who did not qualify for the equipment, including patients who had died, were no longer using the equipment or had been moved to nursing homes,' [US Attorney Bill] Killian said.

In particular,

The lawsuit alleged the firm was ripping off Medicare with its faulty billing practices. According to the lawsuit, unsealed Tuesday, Hill-Rom offered its sales representatives $200 gift certificates and 42-inch televisions as reward for boosting billings and, in 2001, laid off the lion's share of staff dedicated to ensuring compliance with Medicare rules.

Note that this suggests a pattern of providing incentives to employees who "make their numbers," no matter how they do so. We have seen how making the financial numbers seems to take precedence over all else, including patients' well-being, in many contemporary health care organizations.

Maxim Healthcare Settles Fraud Allegations

In a story in the Baltimore Sun,

A Columbia-based health care firm has agreed to a $150 million settlement with the federal government and 43 states to resolve criminal and civil charges that it submitted claims for millions of dollars of work that it did not perform and operated offices that were not properly licensed, officials said Monday.

A five-year federal investigation found that Maxim Healthcare Services Inc., one of the country's largest providers of home healthcare services, submitted $61 million in false claims for services to the federal government's Medicaid and Veterans Affairs health programs over an 11-year period from 1998 to 2009.

Investigators said managers and workers at Maxim repeatedly modified time sheets and documents to cover up the fraud, creating a culture in which submitting false claims became 'common practice.'

The settlement was of criminal as well as civil charges:

The settlement includes a $20 million criminal fine and $130 million in civil settlements.

It will also involve a deferred prosecution or corporate integrity agreement:

In addition to the fines, Maxim also has been charged criminally with conspiracy to commit health care fraud. But the company could avoid conviction if it meets requirements outlined in the settlement.

Unlike many such cases, this one involved criminal charges for and guilty pleas by some people involved in the wrong-doing, in this case, middle managers:

Several regional account managers, a home health aid and a clinical services director also pleaded guilty to criminal charges, government officials said. They could face as much as $250,000 in fines and jail time for their roles in the fraud.

Another atypical result was that the CEO who presided over the misbehavior actually suffered some consequences, although he did not have to pay fines for face criminal charges,

Maxim officials said they take full responsibility for the violations. The company said it hired a new CEO in 2009 and changed its business practices to protect against a repeat.

ProPublica published an article at the same time which noted that Maxim's practices had come into question before,

A different set of problems involving Maxim came up during a ProPublica investigation into the oversight of registered nurses in 2009. We identified several nurses who were hired by the Maryland-based company despite having a record of problems.

Although that previous article did not mention the company's name:

The articles focused on how regulators across the country did little to scrutinize troubled nurses who crossed state lines to continue working. Our earlier stories did not identify Maxim by name.

We have noted that organizations which misbehave once are likely to misbehave again. This may stem from an organizational culture that puts revenue ahead of ethics and patients' and the public's health, and the lack of negative consequences that people who respond to the resulting positive financial incentives are likely to suffer.

Medicis Settles Shareholder Class-Action Lawsuit

Noted by the Arizona Republic,

Medicis Pharmaceutical Corp. and its auditing firm, Ernst & Young, have agreed to pay $18 million to settle a shareholder class-action lawsuit stemming from the pharmaceutical company's financial statements.

The shareholders alleged that Medicis was not honest about its financial affairs:

The shareholders' lawsuit stems from Medicis' announcement in September 2008 that it would restate earnings from 2003 through the first half of 2008.

Shareholders alleged that Medicis offered its wholesale customers generous return policies for prescription drugs as part of an effort to inflate the company's revenue. Medicis would accept returned products that were expired or about to expire at either no cost or substantial discounts to the wholesale customers, according to the lawsuit.

Summary

The constant march of legal settlements by, jury verdicts against, and in some cases criminal convictions of or guilty pleas by large health care corporations indicate how common misbehavior by such organizations has become. Since it is likely that much misbehavior does not lead to publicly announced legal actions, what is published can only provide a floor for an estimate of how common it is. The march, which we have been documenting since starting Health Care Renewal, shows how sleazy and often corrupt health care has become, and how that sleaziness and corruption is prevalent not just among small players, but among the biggest and richest health care organizations, and their top leaders.

One reason the situation continues to be so bad is that while the unethical behavior does sometimes result in pontificating by the civil authorities, and fines that may only be costs of doing business, it rarely leads to meaningful negative consequences for those who authorized, directed or implemented it. This was noted in the reporting of the Maxim Healthcare case above. For example, in the Baltimore Sun article we found,

One watchdog group called the penalty a drop in the bucket for a company that had $2 billion in reimbursements from 2003 to 2009.

'That is hardly crippling,' said Joe Newman, a spokesman for the Project on Government Oversight, which tracks government contractors. 'It is certainly something that stings Maxim's pocketbook, but they will be fine after that.'

'They won't be barred from the Medicaid program. That would hurt them.'

Also, Sun columnist Jay Hancock wrote:

Corporations are happy to be treated as people under the law, as we know from recent court decisions. They can own property. They can seek redress in Congress and the courts. They can make huge political contributions.

But when it comes to being penalized for cheating the government, corporations quickly abandon their personhood and go back to being abstract blobs.

'I don't know about you, but if I hired a contractor to work on my house and he charged me a ton of extra money for work he didn't do, I wouldn't use that contractor again,' Minnesota Sen. Al Franken said in Congress a few months ago. 'And I would make sure my friends knew not to use them either. It seems like the same should be true of government contractors.'

But that is often not the case. For years, government agencies have not vigorously enforced the law when doing so might inconvenience big corporations and their well-paid executives. Maybe this lenience stems from the loony philosophy of former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, who was once regarded as some sort of economic genius, who seemed to think that fraud cannot occur in his idealized idea of a free market, because somehow all bad actors would become widely known and therefore all counter-parties would avoid them. In an article in Stanford Magazine,

The influential Greenspan was an ardent proponent of unfettered markets. Born was a powerful Washington lawyer with a track record for activist causes. Over lunch, in his private dining room at the stately headquarters of the Fed in Washington, Greenspan probed their differences.

'Well, Brooksley, I guess you and I will never agree about fraud,' Born, in a recent interview, remembers Greenspan saying.

'What is there not to agree on?' Born says she replied.

'Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don’t think there is any need for a law against fraud,' she recalls. Greenspan, Born says, believed the market would take care of itself.

For the incoming regulator, the meeting was a wake-up call. 'That underscored to me how absolutist Alan was in his opposition to any regulation,' she said in the interview.

It is a measure of the insanity of recent years that one of the chief leaders of government economic policy did not believe there was any need for laws against fraud.

It appears that this daft idea has carried over to and still influences how many in government and out deal with health care. However, as we have ddiscussed, health care is not and probably cannot ever be an ideal free market. Also, in health care, most of the bad actions remain anechoic, and in many cases it may be hard for counter-parties to avoid bad actors because they may dominate the market. Also, it may be those that make decisions about whether to deal with particular organizations may be executives, and sometimes health care professionals who have become indifferent to the ethical issues.

As I have said again and again, pervasive bad behavior by large health care organizations has got to be a major cause of our ongoing health care dysfunction.

So, to really deter bad behavior, those who authorized, directed or implemented bad behavior must be held accountable. As long as they are not, expect the bad behavior to continue.

The Case of the Bleeding Heart Prosecutors - How the Justice Department Became Lenient with Corporate Wrong-Doing

We have frequently posted, some may say tiresomely, about the lack of consequences or negative incentives for health care organizational leaders involved in wrong-doing.  For example, see the numerous cases against health care organizations that resulted in legal settlements, almost never requiring any penalties against individuals who authorized, directed, or implemented the behavior in question.

Now a major article in the New York Times by Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story explains some of the history behind this aspect of the decreasing accountability of corporate leadership.  Their article focused on financial corporate leadership, but clearly is generalizable to health care corporate leadership.

Banks Asked to Report Their Own Misbehavior

The Times article documents how the US Department of Justice deliberately became more lenient in the 1990s, supposedly to conserve scarce investigational resources:

dating to the mid-1990s ... banks were asked to regularly report suspicious activities to the Treasury Department, an effort that aimed at relieving regulators of some of their enforcement loads.

The Effect of the Arthur Andersen Case

Around the beginning of the 21st century there had been some vigorous prosecution of corporate financial wrong-doing:

The names have become synonymous with corporate wrongdoing — and forceful prosecution: Not just Enron, but also WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia, Rite Aid and ImClone. In the early part of the last decade, senior executives at all these companies were convicted and imprisoned.

However, for reasons that were not explained, a single unsuccessful case caused reconsideration of this approach:

The department began pulling back from a more aggressive pursuit of white-collar crime around 2005, say defense lawyers and former prosecutors, after the Supreme Court overturned a conviction it won against the accounting firm Arthur Andersen. That ended an era of brass-knuckle prosecutions related to fraud at companies like Enron.

Sympathy for the Targets of Investigation

The pullback was rationalized for a sudden sympathy for the objects of investigation:

But by 2005, a debate was growing over aggressive prosecutions, as some business leaders had been criticizing the approach as perhaps too zealous.

That May, Justice Department officials met ahead of a session with a cross-agency group called the Corporate Fraud Task Force. It was weeks after Justice Department lawyers had presented to the Supreme Court their case against Arthur Andersen, which was seeking — successfully, it would turn out — to overturn its criminal fraud conviction in a prominent case.

In the meeting, the deputy attorney general at the time, James B. Comey, posed questions that surprised some attendees, according to two people there who asked to remain anonymous because they were not supposed to discuss private meetings.

Was American business being hurt by the Justice Department’s investigations?, Mr. Comey asked, according to these two people, who said they thought the message had come from others. He cautioned colleagues to be responsible. 'It was a total retrenchment,' one of the people said. 'It was like we were going backwards.'

Mr. Comey said recently that he did not recall this conversation.

Around the same time, the Justice Department was developing instructions on dealing with companies under investigation — particularly companies that work with the government. It issued a memo in 2003 that gave companies more credit for cooperating than in the past. That message was reinforced in another memo in 2006.

As the first memo put it, 'it is entirely proper in many investigations for a prosecutor to consider the corporation’s pre-indictment conduct, e.g., voluntary disclosure, cooperation, remediation or restitution, in determining whether to seek an indictment.'

During this period, the Justice Department increased the use of deferred prosecutions or even nonprosecution agreements.

Many well-known companies have benefited. In 2004, the American International Group, the giant insurer, paid $126 million when it entered a deferred prosecution agreement to settle investigations into claims that it had helped clients improperly burnish financial statements.

Deals over accounting improprieties also were struck that year by Computer Associates International, a technology company, and in 2005 by Bristol- Myers Squibb, a pharmaceutical concern. Prudential Financial entered into a deferred prosecution in 2006 over improper mutual fund trading.

Note that while the emphasis of this article was on the financial services industry, big health care organizations were also benefiting from more lenient treatment.  Note also that one firm given lenient treatment, AIG, went on to threaten collapse, a collapse that was feared could take down the entire world financial system, and hence was given a very generous government bail-out, which has not be paid back to this day. 

Formalized Leniency

In 2008, the approach was formalized:

As the financial storm brewed in the summer of 2008 and institutions feared for their survival, a bit of good news bubbled through large banks and the law firms that defend them.

Federal prosecutors officially adopted new guidelines about charging corporations with crimes — a softer approach that, longtime white-collar lawyers and former federal prosecutors say, helps explain the dearth of criminal cases despite a raft of inquiries into the financial crisis.

Though little noticed outside legal circles, the guidelines were welcomed by firms representing banks. The Justice Department’s directive, involving a process known as deferred prosecutions, signaled 'an important step away from the more aggressive prosecutorial practices seen in some cases under their predecessors,' Sullivan & Cromwell, a prominent Wall Street law firm, told clients in a memo that September.

The guidelines left open a possibility other than guilty or not guilty, giving leniency often if companies investigated and reported their own wrongdoing. In return, the government could enter into agreements to delay or cancel the prosecution if the companies promised to change their behavior.

Less Deterrence

The NY Times article documented a number of opinions that increasing leniency was resulting in less deterrence of bad behavior:

'If you do not punish crimes, there’s really no reason they won’t happen again,' said Mary Ramirez, a professor at Washburn University School of Law and a former assistant United States attorney. 'I worry and so do a lot of economists that we have created no disincentives for committing fraud or white-collar crime, in particular in the financial space.'

Why So Much Sympathy from Prosecutors?

What was not really clear from the article is why US federal prosecutors seemed to go from their stereotypically tough on crime personas to bleeding hearts for corporate criminals. The one rationale the article provided from the Department of Justice was:

Defending the department’s approach, Alisa Finelli, a spokeswoman, said deferred prosecution agreements require that corporations pay penalties and restitution, correct criminal conduct and 'achieve these results without causing the loss of jobs, the loss of pensions and other significant negative consequences to innocent parties who played no role in the criminal conduct, were unaware of it or were unable to prevent it.'

This, however, makes no sense. Well directed prosecutions of the people who apparently authorized, directed or implemented the wrong-doing ought to have very little effect on "innocent parties." The only jobs and pensions that should be lost should be those of the accused.

Conclusions

This seems to be the most recently documented example of important but overlooked, or concealed changes in government policies that have enabled the health care system to become more unethical, dishonest and corrupt, and hence more dysfunctional.

Here we discussed a Supreme Court decision interpreting US anti-trust law that has been used to prevent medical societies from enforcing ethical rules, and hence helped medicine to become increasingly commercialized, and to increasingly put money ahead of patient care.

Here we discussed little discussed legislation from 1945 that allowed US insurance companies/ managed care organizations to avoid federal anti-trust investigation and enforcement, and hence to increased market power.

Here we discussed failure of the executive branch, and especially the Department of Justice to use existing legal doctrine, the Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine, available since 1943, to make corporate leaders responsible for their companies' bad behaviors, leading to their increasing lack of accountability and less deterrence of malfeasance.

Now we have seen a deliberate turn away from even direct penalties on corporations which have misbehaved, in return basically for a promise that "we won't do it again."

The first two examples may be of unintended consequences.

The last two seem to signal an increased coziness between some in government and corporations. The origins of this coziness just beg for investigation.

Meanwhile, there seems to be no evidence that the government's new leniency has protected innocent people who would have been harmed by the previous tougher approach. Instead, there seems to be a growing tide of bad behavior by health care organizations, exemplified by the nature of some of the bad behavior that lead to the march of legal settlements, and to the deferred prosecution agreements and corporate integrity agreements generated in response to the new policies.

What Is to Be Done?

- There clearly needs to be investigation, both by journalists and at a congressional level, of Department of Justice policies that have been increasingly lenient to and cozy with large corporations, including health care corporations.

- Current Department of Justice officials need to be reminded that their clients are the US people, not corporate executives, no matter how hearty and well-met.

ADDENDUM (12 July, 2011) -  See this related post on the Naked Capitalism blog.

ADDENDUM (19 July, 2011) - See related post by Dr Howard Brody on the Hooked: Ethics, Medicine and Pharma blog.

Two More Settlements, One More Corporate Integrity Agreement for Novo Nordisk

And the legal settlements for health care organizations keep right on marching along.  Here are the basics, per the Wall Street Journal, starting with the outline of the first settlement for Novo Nordisk:

Drug maker Novo Nordisk A/S's U.S. affiliate has agreed to pay more than $25 million to end investigations by U.S. authorities related to the marketing of NovoSeven and several diabetes drugs.

In one settlement, Novo Nordisk Inc., the U.S. affiliate, agreed to pay $25 million to end a probe and settle a civil lawsuit related to alleged improper marketing practices regarding Novo Seven, which is used to treat patients suffering from rare bleeding disorders. The complaint had alleged that Novo Nordisk promoted NovoSeven for unapproved uses.

Here is the outline of the second settlement:

Separately, the U.S. affiliate also agreed to pay $1.73 million in a settlement with the U.S. government to resolve allegations that its sales representatives accessed confidential patient information and submitted false Medicaid claims related to the marketing of diabetes drugs, including Novolin and Novolog.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, N.Y., had alleged Novo Nordisk representatives made payments to pharmacists in exchange for recommendations for Novolin and Novolog products. As part of their activities, the pharmacists, or Novo Nordisk sales representatives, accessed confidential patient information, according to the settlement agreement.

Here is the usual pro forma denial by a company spokesperson that the company had done anything wrong:

'We are committed to running our business according to high legal and ethical standards and have been cooperating with the government since the investigation began,' said Jim Shehan, corporate vice president and U.S. general counsel for Novo Nordisk Inc. 'With this settlement, we avoid the distraction and costs of a lengthy legal battle, which would not have been in the best interest of the company or its stakeholders.'

Novo Nordisk denies any wrongdoing related to NovoSeven marketing....

Also,

Novo Nordisk didn't admit wrongdoing in the Novolin pact.

By the way, here is the brief mention of the corporate integrity agreement:

[Novo Nordisk] agreed to enter a five-year corporate integrity agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in which it will add additional reporting and other procedures to its compliance program.

Why would a company that professes "high ethical and legal standards" not contest allegations that it engaged in improper marketing, paid health care professionals to recommend its products, and instigated breaches of patient confidentiality? 

Setting that aside, however, the coverage of this story in the Baltimore Sun  raises further questions.

First, how Novo Nordisk allegedly promoted Novo Seven, and the uses for which it was promoted are disturbing:

the government [did not] back down from its charge that the company engaged in unlawful marketing that helped persuade the Army to treat combat casualties with a largely experimental drug that was not approved for such use by the Food and Drug Administration.

Beginning in 2000, according to the government's claims, Novo Nordisk promoted the drug, also known as NovoSeven, to military doctors and entered into research agreements with Army hospitals. It provided funding for trials in which military officers participated, and gave 'donations and other gifts' to nonprofit foundations on behalf of military physicians. Those practices 'caused the military to use NovoSeven in its trauma patients,' the agreement states.

There was no evidence that Novo Seven decreased the morbidity and mortality of battlefield trauma, but there were reasons to believe the drug increased thrombosis risk:

Numerous clinical studies have since shown, however, that Factor VII is ineffective at controlling traumatic bleeding and can potentially cause blood clots that lead to heart attacks and strokes.

This was not just paying physicians and institutions to market an expensive, but innocuous drug.  It was paying US military physicians and institutions to market a drug that put injured soldiers at risk, but gave them no benefit.  Given the degree of deference public officials give to the brave soldiers that serve the country on the battlefield, one would think that putting them at risk, and putting the honor of their officers and military institutions at risk ought to be a big deal, maybe a big deal requiring more than even a $25 million fine.
On the other hand, although $25 million seems like a lot of money, it pales beside the amounts Novo Nordisk were making from Novo Seven:

Last year Novo Nordisk reported annual sales of NovoSeven of almost $1.6 billion — mainly for treatment of hemophilia. Company officials say roughly 15 percent of its sales are for unapproved uses, or as much as $250 million last year.

So while the settlement seems expensive compared to the cost of defending the suit in court, and it trades the distraction of a corporate integrity agreement for avoiding the "distraction" of further legal action, maybe a settlement equal to only one-tenth of the yearly sales of the relevant drug seemed a good deal for the company.

Since the company was already laboring under a deferred prosecution agreement in the US related to charges of illegal foreign kickbacks (see this post), maybe adding a corporate integrity agreement did not seem like all that much distraction.

On the other hand, the big question is: why was this deal a good one for the US government, or the people which it is supposed to protect? The amount involved only seems like a cost of doing business, and seems disproportionately small given that the allegations involved unlawful marketing that apparently threatened to corrupt US military doctors and hospitals, and were made against a company already under a deferred prosecution agreement for illegal kickbacks. Finally, since the impact of even the relatively small financial payment could be spread among all corporate employees and stockholders, and the deal involved no negative consequences for any individual who authorized, directed or implemented the bad behavior, why would it defer corporate insiders from authorizing or directing future bad behavior?  .

We have heard a series of threats from US government officials that they are about to crack down on big health care companies that misbehave, and, in particular, actually try to impose some negative consequences on the people in those companies that authorized, directed, or implemented bad behavior (see this post). However, we continue to see settlements like this, involving relatively small financial penalties imposed on rather large corporations, and corporate integrity agreements and/or deferred prosecution agreements that do not obviously seem to change how the companies operate.

Although a year ago we discussed threats by the US government to hold health care leaders accountable using the "Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine," which has been available since 1943, so far there is no evidence that this concept has been made operational.

The continuing march of legal settlements now seems to have included most of the previously well reputed commercial health care firms in the US. The length of this march is an indication of how pervasive is bad behavior by such health care organizations, especially when the marchers were accused of behavior that appeared clinically, not just financially unethical.

I assert again that pervasive bad behavior by large health care organizations has got to be a major cause of our ongoing health care dysfunction.

So, to really deter bad behavior, those who authorized, directed or implemented bad behavior must be held accountable.    As long as they are not, expect the bad behavior to continue.

Was the Wright Medical CEO Really "Pleased" to "Continue Our Commitment to the Highest Standards of Legal and Ethical Conduct?"

This story fits into the "if you believed that one, I have a bridge to sell you" category. 

Let's go back seven months to 2010, when we discussed the legal settlement, which included submission to deferred prosecution and corporate integrity agreements by Wright Medical, a device manufacturer.  We noted that the company CEO, one Gary D Henley, said he was "pleased to announce these agreements and look[ing] forward to working with the independent monitor as we continue our commitment to the highest standards of ethical and legal conduct."  At the time, we wondered whether the only real reason he was pleased was that he got to keep his job (with total compensation of greater than $2 million a year) and hang onto his stock options (then consisting of 436,601 shares).

Now it is 2011, and the Memphis Daily News reported that last month, Mr Henley was out of a job:

It was just last month that [Chairman David] Stevens was appointed interim president and CEO after Gary D. Henley resigned from the position, which he had held since 2006.

Stevens at that time asked not to be considered for the permanent position.

Henley tendered his resignation prior to a board of directors meeting called to discuss management’s oversight of the company’s ongoing compliance program.

The board accepted Henley’s resignation, but deemed it to be without 'good reason' under the terms of his employment agreement, making him ineligible for severance.

He was accompanied out the door by

Frank S. Bono, the company’s senior vice president and chief technology officer, for failing to exhibit appropriate regard for Wright’s ongoing compliance program.

It appeared that the previous company leadership may not have been all that "pleased" to work with external monitors to "continue our commitment to the highest standards of ethical and legal conduct." The Daily News also reported:

Wright Medical Group Inc. on Thursday announced that it received a letter from the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey pursuant to Paragraph 50 of the Deferred Prosecution Agreement stating that the USAO believes Wright Medical Group knowingly and willfully breached material provisions of the DPA.

Also, Corporate Counsel reported:

Two days after its general counsel departed abruptly, the Wright Medical Group, Inc., said Thursday that the U.S. attorney’s office believes the company 'has knowingly and willfully' breached its deferred prosecution agreement.

As a result, the company said it could face 'significant liability' including potential criminal and civil litigation. It also faces possible exclusion from federal health care programs such as Medicare, 'which would have a material adverse effect on our financial condition.'

The Tennessee-based company revealed the legal problems in 8-K filings on Wednesday and Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Wright has declined further comment.

One explanation for the company's pessimism:

The board recently received a tip about non-compliance and hired unnamed outside counsel to conduct an internal investigation. The probe found 'credible evidence of serious wrongdoing,' which the board communicated to the U.S. attorney’s office on Wednesday.

The Memphis Daily News noted that another slew of managers just went out the door:

Raymond Kolls, senior vice president, general counsel and secretary, Alicia Napoli, vice president of Clinical and Regulatory Affairs, and Cary Hagan, senior vice president of EMEA Commercial Operations, have all stepped down from their positions.

So should we believe Wright Medical Chairman and now interim CEO Stevens when he said:

The board is committed to maintaining the highest standards of ethical conduct and we remain diligent in ensuring that Wright Medical complies with all applicable laws and regulations...

?

Are you looking to buy a bridge? I know a nice one in Brooklyn.

More seriously, day in and day out we hear righteous, if not pompous pronouncements from health care organizational leaders about their organizations' integrity, brilliant performance, quality of care, devotion to patients, etc, etc, etc. Meanwhile, we have seen an astonishing parade of legal settlements, sometimes including guilty pleas to bribery, fraud, kickbacks, and other crimes by top health care organizations.  This parade raises serious questions about the performance and integrity of some of our biggest and best known health care organizations.

In nearly all cases, these settlements did not include specific negative consequences for those who authorized, directed or implemented the bad behavior that caused the need for the settlements. In nearly every case, the top leaders of the organizations continued to get generous compensation, often more generous than Mr Henley's $2 million plus a year.

Yet rarely does the media, much less health care scholarship check back later to see if the righteous pronouncements turned out to be true. Rarely do they check back to see if the settlements lead to better behavior.

Here is one vivid anecdote that suggests that the pronouncements may be nothing more than vapid PR, and the settlements lead to no change in behavior as long as the people who were in charge when the bad behavior occurred remain in charge, and richly remunerated.

So the next time you see a corporate health care CEO's boasts, think about that bridge in Brooklyn

To reprise: we will not deter unethical behavior by health care organizations until the people who authorize, direct or implement bad behavior fear some meaningfully negative consequences. Real health care reform needs to make health care leaders accountable, and especially accountable for the bad behavior that helped make them rich.

[Originally posted on Health Care Renewal by Roy Poses]

Johnson and Johnson Runs Afoul of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act

Johnson and Johnson, the once highly reputed international pharmaceutical and device company, cannot catch a break. 

International Bribery Charges

As reported by Bloomberg, the latest story is about bribery claims across multiple countries and two continents:

Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), the world’s second-biggest seller of medical products, will pay $70 million after admitting that the company bribed doctors in Europe and paid kickbacks in Iraq to win contracts and sell drugs and artificial joints.

Subsidiaries of J&J paid bribes to doctors and hospital administrators in Greece, Poland and Romania, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice said today in filings at U.S. District Court in Washington. The company also made illegal payments to Iraqi officials to win contracts under the U.N. oil-for-food program, the filings said.

J&J, based in New Brunswick, New Jersey, used slush funds, sham contracts and off-shore companies in the Isle of Man to carry out the bribery, the SEC said. Public health system doctors and administrators who ordered J&J products such as surgical implants or prescribed the company’s drugs were rewarded in a variety of ways, including with cash and travel.

Simultaneously, in the UK,

J&J’s DePuy International Ltd. subsidiary was ordered to pay 4.8 million pounds ($7.9 million) to resolve U.K. claims related to the bribery in Greece, the Serious Fraud Office said in a statement today.

Per the Wall Street Journal, the company also entered into a deferred prosecution agreement.

Admissions of Guilt

The company could not deny wrong-doing, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:

As part of the settlement, J&J acknowledged responsibility for the actions of its units, employees and agents who made 'various improper payments to publicly employed health-care providers in Greece, Poland and Romania in order to induce the purchase of medical devices and pharmaceuticals manufactured by J&J subsidiaries,' according to the Justice Department.

Also,

J&J also acknowledged that kickbacks were paid on behalf of J&J units to the former government of Iraq under the United Nations Oil-for-Food program in order to secure contracts to provide humanitarian supplies.

But No Apology, Nor Acknowledgement of Responsibility
The Johnson and Johnson CEO issued the de rigeur non-apology apology:

'More than four years ago, we went to the government to report improper payments and have taken full responsibility for these actions,' J&J Chief Executive William C. Weldon said in a press release. 'We are deeply disappointed by the unacceptable conduct that led to these violations.'

Notice the clever phrasing that seems to deny that Weldon had any responsibility for these actions, which occurred in the remote past and which were addressed as soon as top management were made aware of them.

Management was Aware

In fact, however, as discussed by Jim Edwards on his BNEt blog, it appears that management had been well aware of the bad behavior for a long time:

But J&J’s internal emails, plus the U.K. Serious Fraud Office’s records, indicate that J&J management knew as early as 1999 that it was making improper payments to Greek sales agents, and that money was disappearing into what it called a 'black hole' in Europe.

Yet J&J later acquired the company that operated that 'black hole' in order to maintain its illegal sales relationships in Greece, according to the SEC’s complaint. And although the SEC praised J&J’s cooperation in its probe, J&J took eight years to initially inform the SEC of its problems.

For the gory details, see his blog post.

Only the Latest Troubles

This latest ethical black eye comes after numerous other troubles for the giant company. As Bloomberg put it:

The settlement comes less than a month after J&J’s McNeil Consumer Healthcare unit signed a consent decree giving the Food and Drug Administration more oversight at three plants making children’s Tylenol, Motrin and other over-the-counter drugs recalled in the past year because of faulty ingredients or foul odors caused by chemical contamination of storage pallets.

The March 10 agreement left the plants under enhanced scrutiny for five years, and J&J faces fines of as much as $10 million a year if the FDA doesn’t approve of changes at the facilities, the company said in a statement last month.

J&J has recalled more than 50 products since the start of 2010, from the consumer medications to failing artificial hips, improperly rinsed contact lenses, insulin cartridges that may leak and cracked syringes loaded with prescription drugs. The company installed a new corporate quality-control director and announced companywide compliance standards in August.

In February, J&J reorganized its consumer division and announced the head of its DePuy Orthopaedics unit had resigned.

There is actually more. We noted last month that Johnson and Johnson's Janssen's subsidiary's Risperdal marketing was found deceptive by a South Carolina jury. In addition,  In 2010, another jury found that the company had committed marketing fraud in its promotion of Risperdal (see post here), and its Ortho-McNeil-Janssen subsidiary also made a guilty plea to a misdemeanor for and civil settlement of charges of "misbranding" Topamax (see post here).

No Penalties for Individuals

As in many such cases we have discussed before, despite the seriousness of the charges and the corporate, although not individual admissions of responsibility, no individual in the US apparently will suffer any negative consequences for the misbehavior.  (Per the WSJ, one UK executive went to prison for bribery by DePuy in Greece.) 

Moreover, rather than suffering, the US company leadership has personally profited.  As we have mentioned more than once, most recently here, the increasing numbers of legal and regulatory sanctions and the increasing numbers of product recalls stand in stark contrast to the plutocratic remuneration given to top Johnson and Johnson executives.  CEO Weldon received about $29 million in 2010, while his top five lieutenants each got from over $5 million to just under $9 million.  The company board asserted that Weldon "met expectations," and exerted "strong leadership."  At best, it appears that the clubby and out-of touch governance of health care organizations, generally by fellow members of the CEO's guild, leavened with a few conflicted academic health care leaders, rewards insiders despite, or even because of  failed leadership.  

So once more with feeling, ... health care organizations need leaders that uphold the core values of health care, and focus on and are accountable for the mission, not on secondary responsibilities that conflict with these values and their mission, and not on self-enrichment. Leaders ought to be rewarded reasonably, but not lavishly, for doing what ultimately improves patient care, or when applicable, good education and good research.  On the other hand, those who authorize, direct and implement bad behavior ought to suffer negative consequences sufficient to deter future bad behavior.

If we do not fix the severe problems affecting the leadership and governance of health care, and do not increase accountability, integrity and transparency of health care leadership and governance, we will be as much to blame as the leaders when the system collapses.

Meanwhile, I can only ask Johnson and Johnson executives and board members, have you no shame?

ADDENDUM (13 April, 2011) - See also posts by Merrill Goozner on the GoozNews blog, and by Maggie Mahar on the HealthBeat blog.

Abbott Laboratories and Pig Roasts, the "Philly Mob," and Legal Settlements

Help.... The health care muck is now being raked so fast I can't keep up.

Abbott Laboratories, Prolific Stenters, Pig Barbecues, Etc

In the last week, multiple media outlets picked up the story of the cozy relationship between Abbott Laboratories and a doctor now accused of implanting too many cardiac stents for too much money.  The essentials were, as summarized from New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Baltimore Sun articles -

Dr Mark Midei was a prolific user of cardiac stents for patient with coronary artery disease (blocked cardiac arteries)

In the June deposition, Dr. Midei estimated that in 2005 — before research revealed that many stents were unnecessary — he performed about 800 stent procedures. Instead of dropping in subsequent years, however, the number of stents Dr. Midei inserted rose to as many as 1,200 annually, he estimated. In a 2007 internal document, Abbott Laboratories ranked Dr. Midei’s use of stents behind only five other cardiologists in the Northeast, including those at hospitals four and five times St. Joseph’s size. [NYT]

Therefore, hospitals sought him out

He had been one of the most sought-after clinicians in his region. Trained at Johns Hopkins University, he was a co-founder of MidAtlantic, a practice with dozens of cardiologists that controlled much of the cardiac business in Baltimore’s private hospitals. Dr. Midei was one of the practice’s stars. When MidAtlantic negotiated a $25 million merger with Union Hospital in 2007, the deal was contingent on his continued employment.

St. Joseph was so concerned about losing Dr. Midei’s business that the hospital offered a $1.2 million salary if he would leave MidAtlantic and join the hospital’s staff. [NYT]

However, it appeared he performed the procedures on patients who would not benefit from them.

The hospital engaged a panel of experts who reviewed 1,878 cases from January 2007 to May 2009 and found that 585 patients might have received unnecessary stents.

When asked to review the cases himself, Dr. Midei found far less blockage than he had initially, according to the Maryland Board of Physicians. The hospital suspended his privileges and eventually sent letters to all 585 patients. Hundreds of lawsuits against Dr. Midei and St. Joseph followed, including from patients treated well before January 2007. [NYT]

Nonetheless, Abbott Laboratories had been rewarding him for frequent use of their products

Word quickly reached top executives at Abbott Laboratories that a Baltimore cardiologist, Dr. Mark Midei, had inserted 30 of the company’s cardiac stents in a single day in August 2008, 'which is the biggest day I remember hearing about,' an executive wrote in a celebratory e-mail.

Two days later, an Abbott sales representative spent $2,159 to buy a whole, slow-smoked pig, peach cobbler and other fixings for a barbecue dinner at Dr. Midei’s home, according to a report being released Monday by the Senate. The dinner was just a small part of the millions in salary and perks showered on Dr. Midei for putting more stents in more patients than almost any other cardiologist in Baltimore. [NYT]

When his over-use was alleged, Abbott continued to use him as a key opinion leader.

Abbott responded to the controversy by hiring Dr. Midei as a consultant. 'It’s the right thing to do because he helped us so many times over the years,' an Abbott executive wrote in a January e-mail cited in the Senate report. [NYT]

Also,

After St. Joseph barred Dr. Midei from practicing there in May 2009, Abbott arranged consultant work for him, according to emails released by the Senate committee.

In December 2009, an Abbott senior vice president wrote in an email that he was 'very open' to having Dr. Midei do consulting 'to see how it might go—either getting the word out in China/Japan, medical or safety work.'

The following month, the Sun reported on the allegations against Dr. Midei and St. Joseph. According to the Senate report, an Abbott executive subsequently said in an internal company email, 'We recommend that we not use Dr. Midei in the U.S. at this time (the press is just too hot).'

Charles Simonton, the medical director of Abbott's vascular division, said in another email cited by the report that Dr. Midei should 'clearly avoid' the Baltimore area, but Dr. Simonton encouraged colleagues to 'please find key physicians or cath labs you'd like him to get in front of with our data.' Abbott wanted to hire Dr. Midei 'because he helped us so many times over the years,' yet another Abbott executive said in an email.

Dr. Simonton didn't return phone calls seeking comment.

Abbott sent Dr. Midei to Japan to promote the Xience stent, but bad publicity caused that trip to be cut short in late January, the report says. In total, Abbott paid the doctor $30,623 to help market the Xience, the Senate investigators found. [WSJ]

When the relationship was criticized, Abbott executives responded with threats, or were they jokes?

I called David Pacitti, vice president of global marketing for Abbott Laboratories' cardiac-plumbing division, to ask why he seems to want goons to beat me up in the newspaper parking lot.

'Don't you have connections in Baltimore?????' Pacitti e-mailed a subordinate regarding a January column I wrote on heart-artery stents. 'Someone needs to take this writer outside and kick his ass! Do I need to send in the Philly mob?'

Pacitti and other Abbott execs apparently don't care for suggestions that their expensive vascular devices often do patients little good and that a star Baltimore doctor took their encouragement to be 'truly outstanding' a bit too much to heart. [Sun]

Furthermore,

Pacitti didn't return my phone calls, but an Abbott flack got in touch on Monday.

'We sincerely apologize if this caused you any concern or distress,' the company spokesman said. Pacitti's comment, he said, 'wasn't meant to be taken seriously.'

Yeah, that's what King Henry II said after they whacked Thomas Becket. [Sun]

So here is a particularly vivid case showing how big health care corporations make "key opinion leaders" out of doctors apparently just because they use or prescribe a lot of the company's products, regardless of the doctors' expertise, or ethics.  As we noted before, "key opinion leaders" are seen by corporate marketing executives as fellow travelers or useful idiots (see posts here, and here). It again appears is that all that health care corporate marketers care about is selling product. Whether their pitches are honest or ethical is besides the point. Those who get in their way are treated with contempt, and maybe, just maybe are threatened with violence

The physicians who are flattered at being called "key opinion leaders," or "thought leaders" have got to realize that the marketers think they are chumps. If they think they are providing honest information, or education, they are deluded.

This case has already been widely discussed in the blogsphere.  See, in particular, posts by Dr Howard Brody on the Hooked: Ethics, Medicine and Pharma blog, and Larry Husten on the CardioBrief blog.

But if that were not enough, on the heels of this story came several more about Abbott Laboratories

Abbott Laboratories Settles, Twice

As reported by the Los Angeles Times, while Abbott was trying to hide Dr Midei overseas, it was also busily negotiating settlements of completely separate charges:

Abbott Laboratories and two other pharmaceutical firms agreed to pay more than $421 million to settle claims of defrauding Medicare and Medicaid in the latest in a string of nine- and ten-figure health care fraud settlements announced by the Justice Department.

The drug companies charged one set of prices to doctors and pharmacies but reported another set of inflated figures that were used as benchmarks by government insurers reimbursing health care providers. The spread, or difference, amounted to kickbacks to the companies' customers, according to Tony West, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's civil division, who announced the settlements on Tuesday.

In particular,

Abbott, of North Chicago, Ill, agreed to pay $126.5 million to settle accusations that it charged the government inflated prices for products ranging from sterile water and saline solution to vancomycin, an antibiotic.

An Abbott spokesman said the company believes 'that we have complied with all laws and regulations' and settled the case to avoid 'the uncertainty associated with continued litigation.'

At least he did not threaten the Department of Justice officials with an attack by the "Philly mob."

But that is not all. The Wall Street Journal reported that Abbott had to make a second, unrelated settlement:

Separately on Tuesday, the Justice Department announced an unrelated $41 million settlement with Abbott subsidiary Kos Pharmaceuticals Inc. on charges that it paid kickbacks to doctors and other health professionals to encourage them to prescribe or recommend the cholesterol drugs Advicor and Niaspan.

As part of that settlement, Kos entered into an agreement that will allow it to avoid prosecution on criminal charges. 'These actions occurred prior to Abbott's acquisition of Kos in 2006 and Abbott has not been accused of any wrongdoing,' an Abbott spokesman said.

However, Abbott chose to acquire a company that allegedly chose to pay kickbacks of this sort. The apparent resemblance to Abbott's payments to Dr Midei in the case above are striking.

By the way, the Los Angeles Times article also noted previous black marks on Abbott's record:

Abbott also paid $614 million in civil and criminal penalties in 2003 to end a federal investigation of the company's marketing practices and Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements.

In 2001, TAP Pharmaceutical Products Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., an Abbott joint venture, agreed to pay $875 million and plead guilty to a criminal charge of conspiring with doctors to overbill Medicare.

At the time, the TAP penalty was the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history, but it has since been eclipsed by at least two others.

So we once again illustrate how punishing wrong doing by fining large corporations, when the fines are just seen as a cost of doing business, in the absence ofany negative consequences on the real people who authorized, directed, or implemented the bad behavior fails to deter future bad behavior.

This remarkable confluence of cases suggest how rotten are the ethical foundations of even large and previously respected health care organizations. I imagine, though, that as long as these corporations richly reward their executives regardless of the ethics of their actions, and regardless of the long term effects on the organizations' reputations, and as long as their are no externally imposed negative consequences on these leaders, the practices will continue, and will get worse.

Health care costs keep rising, access keeps declining, quality gets worse. We moan and wring our hands, but as long as we allow the rot to worsen, and the muck to grow, expect these trends to continue until the whole smelly mess collapses of its own weight (with all those rich executives escaping to their mansions.)

If we really want high quality accessible, reasonably priced health care, we need true health care reform that reduces concentration of power in large organizations, and makes health care organizations' leadership accountable, ethical, and transparent. That will not be easy.

ADDENDUM (8 December, 2010) - See also comments by Maggie Mahar on the HealthBeat blog, David Williams on the Health Business Blog, and Paul Thacker on the Project on Government Oversight blog.