I Wish All Medicaid Fraud Control Units Would Sue

This is how you attack Medicaid fraud in child welfare.  They market this junk to kids, where foster kids are the pharmaceutical industry's lil' darlings because, not only can these companies use them in clinical trials for psychotropics and be funded through grants, but they can also bill Medicaid at the same time.


Below is the complaint for Seroquel and Risperdal.

Utah sues drug company for fraud

November 11th, 2010 @ 7:07am

By Paul Nelson

SALT LAKE CITY -- The state is suing drug maker GlaxoSmithKline for $7.8 million. State officials say the company put the drug Avandia on Utah's Medicaid Program after the pharmaceutical company reportedly made false claims about what the drug could do.

State officials say representatives from GlaxoSmithKline visited the Utah Department of Health, praising Avandia's ability to reduce cardiovascular problems for people with type 2 diabetes and that it was better at lowering blood sugars than other established drugs.

Robert Morton is the assistant attorney general with the Utah Medicaid Fraud Control Unit. He says, "There were some studies that were done that, at least on the surface, appeared to be independent."

Morton says investigators dug through a lot of information from individual lawsuits against GSK and began to question if Avandia really did what the drug makers claimed.

"The information that was discovered in the course of that litigation eventually [rose] to a level where the government became aware of what was going on," he says. Morton says the initial studies that health department officials were shown were actually paid for by GSK. He says those studies were misleading and inaccurate.

"[They] really were incomplete studies either in terms of the number of people they were studying or their definition of a ‘cardiovascular event' was so narrow that the study really became meaningless," he says.

The lawsuit against GSK claims that later studies proved that Avandia did not reduce the risk of heart problems for people with type 2 diabetes. In fact, Morton says studies show that the drug actually increases cardiovascular problems among those patients. He says studies by the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association back the state's claims.

"[I believe] they (GSK) will still maintain the position that they have science to back it up. We don't believe that they do," he says.

KSL's calls to GSK were not returned, but the company posted this statement after the Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency pushed for tighter restrictions on the marketing and labeling of Avandia:

"Dr. Ellen Strahlman, GSK's chief medical officer, said: 'Our primary concern continues to be patients with type 2 diabetes and we are making every effort to ensure that physicians in Europe and the US have all the information they need to help them understand how these regulatory decisions affect them and their patients.'"

Utah Seroquel Risperdal Complaint