The kickbacks took place from 1999 to 2004, the government says, and include payments for the pharmacy's physician prescriber data, which Omnicare had
previously provided at no charge. It also accuses J&J of paying rebates based on Omnicare's success in switching patients from competitors' drugs.
Drug makers
commonly pay rebates on the prices of drugs sold to middlemen, and the practice is legal unless government programs like Medicaid don't get the benefit of the rebate. Prosecutors allege that
J&J tried to disguise rebates as the physician-prescriber-data payments.
Natasha Singer, meanwhile, reports in the New York Times that J&J's dilatory recall of several hundred batches of popular over-the-counter medicines is tarnishing its decades-old reputation as the gold standard in handling such crises.
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