Corporate Whistleblower Ven-A-Care Wins. Jury tells Actavis to pay $170 million

A Texas jury has ordered two subsidiaries of the pharma company Actavis to pay $170 million for overcharging the Texas Medicaid program. The whistleblower in this case, is a corporation called Ven-A-Care which stands to collect over $400 million for blowing the whistle on overpricing of certain drugs. Ven-A-Care is a small Florida independent pharmacy specializing in in-home intravenous treatment, especially for AIDS. In the 1990’2. it began to receive reimbursements from Medicare in the hundreds of dollars for drugs it had purchased from manufacturers for only $50. Medicare explained that the AWP book price. Ven-A-Care’s executives decided to file a whistleblower action against 20 pharma companies under the False Claims Act. Since then, the government joined the suit and a number of cases have settled, yielding Ven-A -Care rewards of close to $400 million. In this instance, a company assisted the government in recognizing wrongdoing and also benefitted itself through the reward program.