Teva will be prosecuted for providing illegal incentives to two charities

Teva will be prosecuted for providing illegal incentives to two charities to encourage the use of the drug Copaxone to treat multiple sclerosis, and allow the company to bounce the price of the drug without hurting the demand for the drug. A Massachusetts court has rejected Teva's request to outright dismiss a lawsuit filed against it by the U.S. Department of Justice in August 2020.
According to the lawsuit, Teva fraudulently withdrew payments from the federal health insurance company Medicare, flowing $ 328 million to two charities between 2006 and 2015. According to the lawsuit, the payments - intended to cover the deductibles of MS patients who received a prescription for Copaxone - allowed Teva to quadruple the price of the drug during that period to $ 73,000 per patient per year.
According to an estimate made by analyst Dr. Roni Gal near the filing of the current lawsuit, Teva's maximum exposure is $ 3-4 billion.
The donations resulted in applications for reimbursement of the cost of purchasing the drugs to Medicare, which were inflated by hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the lawsuit, Teva violated the US False Claim Act and acted contrary to the US legislature's intention to curb drug prices and the cost of purchasing them for the taxpayer through the deductible component. From marketing the drug to Medicare.

The law does not allow drug companies to donate to charities that offer deductible payments, nor does it prohibit them from directly subsidizing patients' deductibles. Teva claimed in the motion for outright dismissal of the lawsuit that it had no control over the use made by the charitable funds of the funds it had donated to them, and that it only hoped that they would be used for payments for Copaxone.
Judge Nathaniel Gordon ruled that plaintiffs showed a reasonable suspicion that Teva did not settle for hoping the funds it donated would be used to buy Copaxone - but contacted a Florida pharmacy, Advanced Care Scripts, which coordinated with charitable funds that Teva transferred to them to cover participation fees. According to the lawsuit, Teva coordinated with the pharmacy to make sure the donations were the same as the amounts required to fund Copaxone patients' deductibles so that all the money they donated would be used for this purpose.
According to an estimate made by analyst Dr. Roni Gal near the filing of the lawsuit, Teva's maximum exposure is $ 3-4 billion. The fact that 7% of Teva's revenue from marketing Copaxone in the US was from the sale of the drug to Medicare. However, Gal estimated that the damage to nature would be significantly lower, based on precedents of other pharmaceutical companies in similar cases.
Another legal cloud that rests on nature is the lawsuits filed against it for its alleged part in the opioid epidemic - which has resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Americans in the last two decades from narcotic painkillers.
Teva, as well as other drug companies, has been accused of spreading the wrong message about the dangers of addictive drugs, and exaggerating their clinical benefit - in an attempt to extend their use beyond erupting pain in terminally ill cancer patients, which was their primary indication.
One of the legal arenas in which such a lawsuit is being conducted against Teva is New York State. Endo (+ 32.86% 2.79), which is one of the defendants on the nature side and Abbvie (-0.55% 106.68), agreed last Thursday to pay $ 50 million to end the lawsuit filed against it by the state's attorney general, Laticia James, and in the hands of two counties. The arrangement did not include any endo confession of any offense. The lawsuits against Teva and against Abway continue to be clarified.
"Teva has always been committed to patient health and the availability of affordable medicines, including ensuring access to treatment for patients with multiple sclerosis. The Multiple Sclerosis Treatment Program is designed to support patients in need of important treatment options by making donations to independent charities that have assisted charitable organizations. "Access to the drugs prescribed by their doctors.