The U.S. Department of Justice has arrested a physician and former president of a drug maker for violating the Anti-Kickback Statute over the company’s osteoporosis drugs, Actonel and Atelvia.
Rita Luthra, M.D. was arrested on October 22, 2015, for allegedly accepting free meals and speaker fees from the drug maker, Warner Chilcott, in return for prescribing the company’s osteoporosis drugs. She is also accused of allowing pharmaceutical sales reps access to patient records and then lying about it to federal investigators.
Luthra, of Longmeadow, Massachusetts, is a gynecologist. She is indicted on “one count of violating the Anti-Kickback Statute, one count of wrongful disclosure of individually identifiable health information and one count of obstructing a criminal health care investigation by lying to federal agents and directing an employee to do the same, ” according to a Justice Department announcement.
The drug company allegedly paid Luthra $23, 500 from October 2010 through November 2011 to prescribe the osteoporosis drugs. Warner Chilcott sales reps allegedly brought food to Luthra’s medical office for her and her staff on 31 occasions and paid her $750 to talk with her for 25-30 minutes while she ate her lunch.
On another occasion, the Justice Department claims the company paid to cater a barbeque at Luthra’s house. She is also accused of taking $250 for speaker training, despite never having spoken to other physicians.
The Justice Department says that Luthra’s prescriptions of the drug company’s osteoporosis drugs increased during the time she was taking money from the company and “precipitously” declined once she stopped being paid.
When she was interviewed by federal agents about her relationship with the company, she allegedly lied about taking the money and meals and denied that she had allowed the company’s sales reps to access her patient’s files. She also told one of her employees to lie to the agents.
Luthra could get up to five years in jail, three years of supervised release and a fine of $25, 000 for violating the Anti-Kickback Statute. The fine for disclosing her patients’ health information is stiffer, possibly costing her $50, 000, but only one year in jail and one year of supervised release.
Obstructing justice starts to get really expensive. That could cost her $250, 000, five years on jail and three years of supervised release.
Massachusetts has had public disclosure of payments to healthcare providers since 2009, but the Justice Department announcement did not indicate how the payments were discovered.
U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Phillip Coyne, Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General, Office of Investigations, made the announcement of Luthra’s arrest and indictment. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Miranda Hooker and David Schumacher of Ortiz’s Health Care Fraud Unit.
The Justice Department announcement noted the details contained in the indictment are allegations and Luthra is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
Warner Chilcott Guilty Plea
In a separate Justice Department announcement on October 29, 2015, Warner Chilcott agreed to plead guilty to healthcare fraud in Massachusetts and pay the government $125 million to settle both civil and criminal allegations against it. Under the plea agreement, the company will pay a criminal fine of $22.9 million and a civil settlement of $102 million to the federal government and the states that made payments through Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs. The whistleblowers who sued Warner Chilcott under the False Claims Act in 2011 will receive approximately $22.9 million from the civil portion of the settlement.
Former Warner Chilcott President W. Carl Reichel, of Chester, New Jersey, was arrested in Boston October 29 on one count of conspiring to pay kickbacks to physicians.
