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PHARMALOT
By Ed Silverman // December 19th, 2011
Boasting about recovering lots of money from prosecuting health care fraud has become an annual pasttime at the US Department of Justice. In general, fraud is a hot topic. Why? For the second consecutive fiscal year, the feds recovered more than $3 billion under the False Claims Act, and the total since January 2009 was $8.7 billion.
Of the $3 billion recovered this past fiscal year, which ended September 30, $2.4 billion in recoveries involving fraud committed against federal health care programs, nearly matching the $2.5 billion recovered in the previous fiscal year (see here). And of the $3 billion, whistleblower cases filed under the False Claims Act accounted for $2.8 billion.
As for drugmakers, the feds say that enforcement actions involving the pharmaceutical industry were, once again, the source of the largest recoveries this year. In all, the Justice Department recovered nearly $2.2 billion in civil claims against drugmakers last fiscal year, including $1.76 billion in federal recoveries and $421 million in state Medicaid recoveries (here is the Justice Department statement).