Pfizer Agrees to Pay Nearly $24 Million to Put Kickback Claims to Rest

Pfizer agreed to pay $23.85 million and enter into a five-year corporate integrity agreement to settle U.S. government claims that the company engaged in illegal kickbacks to Medicare patients that were masked by an independent charity.

The government accused the pharmaceutical giant of generating revenue by using a third-party specialty pharmacy to transfer Medicare patients using three Pfizer drugs — Sutent (sunitinib malate), Inlyta (axitinib) and Tikosyn (dofetilide) — to the charity foundation instead of giving Sutent and Inlyta to patients who met the financial qualifications of the company’s free drug program.

With regard to Tikosyn, Pfizer increased the wholesale cost of a package of forty .125 mg capsules of the drug by over 40 percent in the last three months of 2015, allegedly knowing that the price increase would raise Medicare beneficiaries’ copay obligations and possibly prevent some from being able to afford the drug.