This is the largest health care fraud settlement in history of the Department of Justice from illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products to American pharmaceutical giant pfizer Inc.
This announcement just release on wednesday, September 2, 2009. Detail release see www.usdoj.gov

Essentially, Pfizer asked the FDA to approve Bextra for a variety of diseases and conditions, and when the FDA refused those approvals, Pfizer decided to go ahead and market the drugs for those diseases and conditions anyway (off-label marketing).

But that’s not all. In the DOJ statement, you’ll read the following:

Pfizer has agreed to pay $1 billion to resolve allegations under the civil False Claims Act that the company illegally promoted four drugs — Bextra; Geodon, an anti-psychotic drug; Zyvox, an antibiotic; and Lyrica, an anti-epileptic drug — and caused false claims to be submitted to government health care programs for uses that were not medically accepted indications and therefore not covered by those programs. The civil settlement also resolves allegations that Pfizer paid kickbacks to health care providers to induce them to prescribe these, as well as other, drugs. The federal share of the civil settlement is $668,514,830 and the state Medicaid share of the civil settlement is $331,485,170. This is the largest civil fraud settlement in history against a pharmaceutical company.

False claims, kickbacks, felony crimes and civil fraud… it seems that the truth about pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer is finally starting to emerge.

And here’s the best part: Pfizer’s own whistleblowers will cash in! “Six whistleblowers will receive payments totaling more than $102 million from the federal share of the civil recovery,” says the DOJ.

Along with this admission of guilt for committing a felony crime, Pfizer is paying well over $1 billion in criminal fines, plus another $1 billion or so to resolve civil allegations against its fraudulent marketing practices. In all, the multi-billion dollar settlement is the largest in the history of the DOJ.

Pharmaceutical industry should be subjected to our nation’s laws, and yet it has operated in a largely lawless fashion for decades. The FTC, for example, which should be investigating the drug industry monopolies that rip off American consumers and limit consumer choice, has all but ignored the monopolistic (and highly illegal) practices of the pharmaceutical industry. But the Dept. of Justice has now apparently decided that enough is enough — it’s going to investigate and prosecute serious criminal fraud being committed by drug companies.