A $125 million settlement has been announced in a major class action lawsuit involving members of the Prescription Access Litigation (PAL) coalition. The case, In re Pharmaceutical Industry Average Wholesale Price Litigation, was originally filed in 2002,

Yesterday, The Boston Globe reported that Fidelity Investments will pay $8 million to settle charges that traders improperly accepted gifts from brokers seeking their business.  The SEC investigation revealed that traders for the Boston-based company rece

PostScript spends a lot of time talking about industry payments to physicians – often bribes by another name.  So when we ran across this article in the Economist Budapest diary about bribes to doctors – from patients – we were intrigued.  (Inside the lin

The FDA Amendments Act of 2007, also known as FDAAA, as in "open wide and say FDAAA," is a riveting 156-page read, and buried in its contents is a provision, known to its friends as 121 Stat. 890 Sec. 502(f)(1), that requires drugmakers to include a toll

Bill Gates, the cofounder and chairman of the Microsoft, and cofounder and cochair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, recently spoke at the University of Chicago. A major focus of the Foundation, which is one of the largest in the world, is on i

Tony Garr, the Executive Director of the Tennessee Health Care Campaign, has an op-ed today in The Tennessean. The Tennessee Health Care Campaign is a member of the Prescription Access Litigation coalition. We here at the PAL Blog aim to highlight the

Works-in-progress: Globe looks at Massachusetts AMCs This week started with an editorial in the Boston Globe about Massachusetts medical centers that have tackled conflict of interest, those that haven’t, and those that are working on it. Bearcats in whit

The brand-name pharmaceutical industry constantly pushes the myth that its expensive blockbusters are breakthrough treatments that greatly increase people's health and well-being, and thus are worth the high price-tag. That myth has more holes than a sli

Representative Rose DeLauro (D-CT), chair of the House Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees funding of the Food and Drug Administration, held an oversight hearing yesterday, “Improving t