A Tale of Bribery, Racketeering, and 28,000 Deaths

There are so many reasons to keep the NHS from being privatised; Here is just another one when a health system is based on profit rather than care.

 Insys Files for Bankruptcy

Fentanyl-peddler Insys Therapeutics (INSY) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy just days after agreeing to pay the Department of Justice $225 million for its part in the ongoing opioid crisis.

The bankruptcy filing comes on the heels of a guilty plea, in which Insys admitted to five counts of fraud and bribing doctors to prescribe their dangerous opioid Subsys. (As well of two counts of being two-dimensional white-collar villains from a bad student film.)

Subsys is an oral spray developed for cancer patients that contains fentanyl — an opioid 100 times stronger than morphine. Just 3 milligrams of fentanyl can cause an overdose, compared to 30 milligrams of heroin. In 2017 alone, more than 28,000 U.S. citizens died of fentanyl overdoses.

For their part in the scheme, a federal jury in Boston found Insys founder John Kapoor and four former Insys execs guilty of racketeering (which sounds a lot better than “killing a whole bunch of people for money”).

Between 2012 and 2015, while Kapoor was chairman, Insys used fake “speaker programs” to bribe doctors to prescribe Subsys to patients in dangerously high doses, even if they didn’t need it.

The company also neglected to tell insurance companies just how dangerous the drug was, so they would cover the $10,000/month cost of a Fentanyl prescription.

Read the story from Bloomberg:-
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-10/insys-becomes-first-corporate-casualty-of-opioid-epidemic?srnd=markets-vp