STAT+: Gilead will pay $202 million to settle charges of paying kickbacks to docs for boosting HIV drug sales
The company paid to settle allegations of paying kickbacks to doctors in exchange for prescribing several of its HIV medicines.
Gilead Sciences agreed to pay $202 million to settle allegations of paying kickbacks to doctors in exchange for prescribing several of its HIV medicines, the latest example of a controversial practice that has come back to haunt numerous drugmakers over the years.
From 2011 through 2017, Gilead held more than 17,300 speaker programs of which 9,500 were dinners to promote sales of HIV drugs that were supposed to be educational. The dinners were at expensive restaurants that federal authorities maintained were “wholly inappropriate” venues for such gatherings. Moreover, the dinners were also held repeatedly on the same topics, and doctors who continually attended were fed “lavish meals.”
As an example, Gilead paid more than $300,000 in honorarium payments to a physician who eventually wrote prescriptions for its HIV drugs that resulted in over $6 million in Medicare, Medicaid, and TRICARE payments for the medicines. Meanwhile, more than 80 doctors attended five or more HIV dinner programs on the same topic within a six-month period, according to the complaint.
