Gilead Sciences agreed to pay $202 million to settle allegations of paying kickbacks to medical doctors in trade for prescribing a number of of its HIV medicines, the newest instance of a controversial follow that has come again to hang-out quite a few drugmakers through the years.
From 2011 by means of 2017, Gilead held greater than 17,300 speaker applications of which 9,500 had been dinners to advertise gross sales of HIV medicine that had been alleged to be academic. However the dinners had been at costly eating places that federal authorities maintained had been “wholly inappropriate” venues for such gatherings. Furthermore, the dinners had been additionally held repeatedly on the identical subjects, and so medical doctors who frequently attended had been fed “lavish meals.”
For instance, Gilead paid greater than $300,000 in honorarium funds to a doctor who ultimately wrote prescriptions for its HIV medicine that resulted in over $6 million in Medicare, Medicaid, and TRICARE funds for the medicines. In the meantime, greater than 80 medical doctors attended 5 or extra HIV dinner applications on the identical matter inside a six-month interval, in line with the criticism.
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