

Pfizer and US Govt Set up Fake Subsidiary to take Lawsuit - alanthonyc
http://techdirt.com/articles/20100402/1844298860.shtml

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bd_at_rivenhill
_Pfizer was deemed "too big to fail" like that. Why? I have no idea. If the
company really did have to close down, it seems likely that others would have
picked up the company's various products -- and perhaps done so without
putting people's lives at risk._

Pfizer is the number one drug company by sales in the world, so it seems
unlikely to me that not being able to bill Medicare/Medicaid for their
products would have shut them down. A more likely scenario was that they dared
the prosecutors to indict the parent company and then explain to seniors and
poor people why they were suddenly required to pay full freight for Lipitor,
Zithromax, Celebrex, etc. Pfizer still owns patents to major, important drugs
and it seems unlikely that the government could change that without passing
broad legislation or running into constitutional issues. I suspect that the
people who run the justice department took a hard look at this situation and
decided to let these guys off the hook and spin it as "too big to fail"
instead of facing the political consequences of prosecuting aggressively. The
law preventing companies from billing government insurance programs looks like
more of a bug than a feature at this point because it would give them extra
leverage if they decided to play chicken with prosecutors in these cases.

