Worse Than Theranos

Insys Therapeutics founder John N. Kapoor leaves federal court in Boston on March 13, 2019. Photo: Pat Greenhouse/Boston Globe via Getty Images In early December, while Elizabeth Holmes was testifying in her own defense in the most heavily covered white-collar criminal trial in recent memory, an entirely different criminal proceeding involving the health-care industry was taking place across the country.

When Whitten pleaded guilty over the summer, he admitted he had accepted kickbacks from a company called Insys Therapeutics for two and a half years beginning in May 2013 in exchange for prescribing Subsys, which had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2012 for “breakthrough cancer pain” experienced by patients already suffering from long-term pain related to the disease.

They were accused of racketeering based on a kickback scheme in which the company paid practitioners to prescribe Subsys. It began in mid-2012 and involved targeting pain-management specialists who prescribed opiates at high rates with payments through a “speaker program.” Under the program, practitioners would get paid for convening programs in which they presented information on Subsys to other health-care providers as part of an effort that was supposed to be educational, at least nominally.

All of the convictions were affirmed last summer by a plainly disgusted appellate panel. The judges called the case “a chilling tale of suffering that did not need to happen” involving “a group of pharmaceutical executives who chose to shunt medical necessity to one side and shamelessly proceeded to exploit the sickest and most vulnerable among us — all in an effort to fatten the bottom line and pad their own pockets.

Objectively, the effects of the Insys scandal were much worse than the consequences of the Theranos debacle, which, while unfortunate for many customers who received inaccurate blood tests — one of them received a result that may have indicated that she had HIV — did not result in any identifiable deaths or the sorts of disturbing stories that emerged during the trial of Kapoor and his co-defendants.

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