Exagen Diagnostics Inc., of Vista, Calif., has agreed to pay slightly more than $653,000 to resolve allegations that it had paid specimen processing fees to physicians to induce those physicians to use Exagen’s lab tests.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) reported on October 2 that Genomic Health Inc. (GHI), now a subsidiary of Exact Sciences Corp., has agreed to pay $32.5 million to settle allegations that the company violated the False Claims Act (FCA). The allegations include that GHI had manipulated the dates upon which a test was administered in order to boost revenues from public health programs, an activity that ended up costing the company double damages.
Two U.S. federal government departments recently issued a series of guidelines for their handling of mergers and acquisitions in a draft that has provoked both support and opposition from observers. Barry Nigro of the George Washington University School of Law said he is concerned that the presumption that a transaction is necessarily anticompetitive will prompt litigation over that presumption and thus bog down the process of reviewing these transactions.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has been aggressively pursuing fraud perpetrated on the American public in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic, but the formal end of the U.S. public health emergency might seem to suggest that these efforts would be winding down. Nonetheless, deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco has announced that DOJ will open two new strike force offices under the agency’s COVID fraud operations, making clear that the agency is still intent on chasing down fraudsters across the U.S.
U.S. federal government agency recoveries under the False Claims Act (FCA) are down slightly in the first half of 2023 relative to the first half of 2022, but that doesn’t mean companies in the life sciences can afford to let their guard down. The Senate is examining two pieces of legislation that would significantly amplify the risk for device and drug makers, including a Senate bill that would eviscerate the materiality standard as set by the U.S. Supreme Court in Escobar.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been exceptionally active in the mergers and acquisitions space for the past 18 months, but Congress might soon amplify these agencies’ ability to suppress these transactions. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who chairs the competition subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a recent hearing that vertical mergers have flown largely off the enforcement radar, a problem that Congress could address by several means, including by providing the FTC with a heftier budget to pursue these cases.
Advocates are pressing the U.S. Congress to pass legislation to require more Medicare coverage of telehealth and telemedicine, but the Office of Inspector General (OIG) continues to report instances of fraud in this area. OIG reported July 24 that government attorneys had forced a guilty plea out of a telemedicine provider who has agreed to pay $44 million to deal with charges of fraud perpetrated over a period of three and a half years.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been exceptionally active in the mergers and acquisitions space for the past 18 months, but Congress might soon amplify these agencies’ ability to suppress these transactions. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who chairs the competition subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a recent hearing that vertical mergers have flown largely off the enforcement radar, a problem that Congress could address by several means, including by providing the FTC with a heftier budget to pursue these cases.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have floated a new set of guidelines that would govern their reviews of mergers in a variety of markets, including the drug and device industries. While many of these guidelines are vaguely worded and open to interpretation, one of the more ambiguously worded passages states that a merger may be rejected if it could create “a clog on competition,” a phrase that appears in a Supreme Court decision handed down more than 60 years ago.
The U.S. Office of Inspector General (OIG) reported June 28 that it had launched a series of enforcement actions against perpetrators of a variety of forms of health care fraud, including in the areas of telemedicine and opioid abuse. The 78 individuals arraigned in this crackdown are said to be responsible for $2.5 billion.
