Big Pharma Is Paying For Their Drugs to Be Purchased by Charities

Big Pharma Is Paying For Their Drugs to Be Purchased by Charities

Big Pharma Is Secretly PAYING For These “Purchases”

(LibertySons.org) – Big pharma is under a microscope after a study revealed these companies might be participating in a scheme to pad their profits. Despite federal laws preventing drug manufacturers from using charities to their benefit, some top makers seem to be skirting the rules and using carefully targeted donations to turn a profit from Medicare patients.

HealthAffairs published a study looking back to 2010 through 2017. Researchers found some drug companies took advantage of a loophole in the Anti-Kickback Statute. The law prohibits pharmaceutical manufacturers from making money by covering the costs Medicare patients pay for medications they produce.

In other words, a company cannot donate funds to charities that help Medicare patients and restrict those donations to pay only for its brand of medicine. Yet, manufacturers have discovered they can restrict the use of their donations to treat specific conditions. The trick is, in some cases, only that manufacturer might produce a treatment for the ailment.

Focusing on those conditions where they have the only answer or the most prominent one, pharmaceutical makers give to a charity that will most likely buy their drugs. Essentially, they are making money off their charitable giving, but in a roundabout way that bypasses the kickback statute.

Takeda used this scheme with the bowel syndrome treatment Gattex in 2017. The company managed to capture about 99.6% of the market that year. The HealthAffairs researchers found more than half of the Medicare spending for certain conditions tied back to one manufacturer that made a drug to treat the illness.

In 2019, the federal government cracked down on drug makers and charities for similar pharmaceutical kickback issues.

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