Originally published July 21 2004
Florida Attorney General sues six pharmaceutical companies for price fixing and possibly defrauding Medicaid
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Demonstrating yet again that pharmaceutical companies will do anything to make a buck, six such companies are under fire by the Florida Attorney General who has issued civil subpoenas concerning potential overcharges to Medicaid in the amount of $100 million. Apparently, the pharmaceutical companies involved in this scam inflated the "wholesale" prices charged to Medicaid, thereby pocketing additional profits at the expense of taxpayers. That pharmaceutical companies would overcharge the government for prescription drugs should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the dealings of the industry. Companies routinely mark up prescription drugs as much as 500,000% over the cost of the raw ingredients, and they engage in monopolistic, mob-like behaviors to block competing, lower cost drugs from Canada and other countries.
In the mean time, the pharmaceutical industry has long since demonstrated its own alarming lack of ethics by, for example, hiding the results of negative drug trials, distorting other trials to show false benefits of drugs, and outright bribing physicians with so-called "consulting fees" if they'll write more prescriptions for their drugs.
I've frequently called for criminal investigations of pharmaceutical companies and even the FDA. This action by the Florida Attorney General is a step in the right direction, but it barely scratches the surface of the extremely profitable criminal operation known as Big Pharma.
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