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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Beatrice E. Manning, PhD, Communications Media Department, Fitchburg State College, 160 Pearl St., Fitchburg, MA 01420, 9786653546, beatrice.manning@att.net and Charles M. Alcorn, DS, Law School, Temple University, 1719 North Broad St., Philadelphia, PA 19122.

This paper reports on a federal case that the government won against the pharmaceutical company, Schering Plough. This massive crime resulted in Schering Plough entering a criminal guilty plea with a fine of $50M and paying a civil penalty of $292M. Two of the whistleblowers involved in this case will describe the details as they relate to equality, including the extreme amount by which Medicaid and public health clinics over-paid for Claritin and the unfair market disadvantage to HMO's and other insurers who refused to participate in Schering's kick-back scheme. The description and discussion of this case will include the ethical decisions necessary for researchers working in pharmaceutical firms, and HMOs and health insurance firms, and the culture of pharmaceutical firms and how this impinges on one's feeling of agency and related suppression of ethical decision-making. The scheme that the authors will describe involves the use of a subsidiary for which they worked. This subsidiary provided award winning health management programs and data analysis services to HMOs and health insurers. The scheme involved giving these services for free or below cost as kickbacks to insurers that would put Claritin on their formularies. This case study demonstrates the need for ethics to extend beyond quality of work and human subject protection to a responsibility to know how one's work is being used. Using this scheme Schering made huge profits on their largest selling drug by charging the highest prices to public programs designed for the poorest among us.

Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of this session the participant (learner)will be able to

• Know and access the various resources to help them act to end unethical behavior.
• Develop criteria to define ethics more broadly than the traditional protection of human subjects criteria.
• Identify and critique work place cultures that decrease worker's senses of agency.

Keywords: Ethics, Ethics Training

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation