According to a Wall Street Journal article, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) will soon introduce a bill that would force law-breaking pharma companies to share a small percentage of their profits with the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fund scientific research.
Drug companies that reach settlements with the federal government for paying kickbacks to doctors, defrauding Medicare or Medicaid or illegally marketing medicines would have to pay 1% of their annual profits for each blockbuster medicine that can be traced to public sector research, the article said. The penalty would run for five years, which Warren says is the same amount of time covered under most settlements.
Warren says that if her Medical Innovation Act had been in place over the past five years, the NIH would have had an extra $6 billion annually to fund research grants. Read the full story
