A news release issued Monday, upon the U.S. stock market opening claimed to be from Walmart and said that the nation’s largest retailer would begin accepting payment in Litecoin, a digital currency.
Several media outlets wrote it up thinking it was real. the twitter account for the Litecoin Foundation,...
On September 9, 2021, a judge in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts denied Teva Pharmaceuticals' motion to dismiss the United States' complaint alleging that Teva paid hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks to Copaxone patients via two foundations, Chronic Disease Fund dba Good Days (CDF)...
A group of South Carolina healthcare providers, laboratories, and testing facilities owned or managed by chiropractor Daniel McCollum will pay a total of $140 million to the U.S. government after failing to defend against charges of kickback schemes and unnecessary testing brought forth by a whistleblower complaint. According to the U.S. Department...
The Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) is pressing a new theory of liability concerning insider trading laws. Specifically, the SEC is requesting that a federal court deem the practice of "shadow trading" illegal under existing law. Shadow trading is a practice in which an individual associated with an entity trades in another...
On September 7, 2021, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Boston announced a grand jury indictment of medical device company SpineFrontier, Inc., and two of its executives, Kingsley Chin and Aditya Humad, for violating the anti-kickback statute by allegedly paying surgeons bogus "consulting" fees to induce the surgeons to use SpineFrontier products...
The U.S. Government has filed a lawsuit against the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and James Luketich, M.D. Chair of UPMC's Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery. The complaint alleges that Dr. Luketich regularly performs as many as three, complex surgical procedures at the same time, fails to participate in...
Today, the First Circuit affirmed all of the convictions of the executives of Insys, the manufacturer of a highly-addictive sublingual fentanyl spray that the FDA had approved only to treat breakthrough cancer pain. Congratulations to Assistant United States Attorneys Nat Yeager and David Lazarus for successfully leading perhaps the most important pharma...
California Attorney General Rob Bonta today announced a $75 million nationwide settlement with global pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), resolving allegations that BMS underpaid the drug rebates owed to Medi-Cal and other state Medicaid programs. According to a complaint filed by a whistleblower, BMS overcharged the states for its pharmaceuticals by...
A licensed pharmacist, Tangtang Zhao of Chicago, was arrested in Chicago on charges relating to his alleged sale of dozens of authentic Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 vaccination cards on eBay.
Court documents say that in March and April 2021,...
In a precedential opinion that likely have a significant impact on several large pending cases, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit today upheld application of the so-called Overpayment Rule, 42 C.F.R. § 422.326, to Medicare Advantage organizations. See UnitedHealthcare Insurance Co. v. Becerra, No. 18-5326 (D.C. Cir. Aug....
