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Would a calculator help?
Washington Monthly, April, 2005 by Charles Peters
Another example of make-believe is a law passed in 1990 requiring drug companies to give Medicaid the "best price" According to the Government Accountability Office, however, the law has not been enforced. The result, according to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), is that "for fifteen years, drug companies have been profiting from a system that costs taxpayers untold hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars annually."
Why have the companies not obeyed the law? They say that the government office that administers the drug program, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has failed to give them "dear guidance" on how to figure out the best price. Government officials, according to Robert Pear of The New York Times, defend themselves by saying they "lacked the resources" to verify the correctness of the price.
In one case that the government discovered accidentally through some drug company whistleblowers, Schering-Plough was found to have short-changed the government by a total of $345 million.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Washington Monthly Company
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
