Posts tagged - Cardinal Health

Trump’s Drug Czar Candidate Withdraws Amid Conflict of Interest Allegations

Posted on: October 17, 2017, in: , , , , , , , , ,

Rep. Tom Marino

Rep. Tom Marino

A Tweet this morning from President Trump said Rep. Tom Marino, Trump’s candidate for Drug Czar, is withdrawing from consideration.

The withdrawal came on the heels of a Washington Post article that said Marino received $100,000 from a pharmaceutical lobby and was chief advocate of a bill – the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act – that weakened the DEA’s efforts to stop opioid prescription abuse. According to the Post, “The drug industry spent $106 million lobbying Congress on the bill and other legislation between 2014 and 2016.” The law weakens the ability of the DEA, said the Post, to require the distributors of legal prescription pharmaceuticals to report suspicious shipments from manufacturers to retailers – shipments that could be destined for the black market through corrupt physicians, pain clinics and pharmacies.

An investigation last year by the Post  unearthed 13 companies the publication believed were ignoring potentially illegal diversion of opioids. They included McKesson, Cardinal Health, Amerisource­Bergen, Miami-Luken, KeySource Medical, and Walgreens.

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Attorneys General Investigate BigPharma 

Posted on: September 19, 2017, in: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today announced a bipartisan coalition of 41 attorneys general from across the country who will investigate whether pharmaceutical companies are engaged in any unlawful practices in the marketing and distribution of prescription opioids. Information and documents were demanded of Endo International plc, Purdue Pharma, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd./Cephalon Inc. and Allergan Inc.

Also under scrutiny are Amerisource Bergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson which handle 90 percent of the opioid distribution in the U.S, and make about $500 billion per year in revenue. “Too often, prescription opioids are the on-ramp to addiction for millions of Americans,” said Schneiderman in a release. “We’re committed to getting to the bottom of a broken system that has fueled the epidemic and taken far too many lives.”

Schneiderman in the release says that agreements with insurers have put an end to requiring prior authorization for medication-assisted treatment (“MAT”). But Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said earlier this year the MAT is “ … just substituting one opioid for another, we’re not moving the dial much.”

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