Healthcare

Capital Punishment or Capital Reward?

When Betsy DeVos was nominated to head the Department of Education, the main concern was what harm a “choice” crusader would bring to K-12 public schools. Recently we’ve seen that she can also cause damage with regard to post-secondary education.

DeVos announced plans to delay the implementation of rules on for-profit colleges that the Obama Administration fought long and hard to bring into being. Calling the plan unfair, DeVos said she wants to redo the rulemaking process from scratch – a clear sign that she wants to weaken or eliminate the restrictions. That’s the premise of a lawsuit just filed against DeVos by the attorneys general of 18 states and the District of Columbia.

The Obama campaign against predatory colleges was one of the most consequential initiatives of the administration on corporate misconduct. In addition to the rules – one of which is designed to bar federal loans at schools whose graduates don’t earn enough to pay off their debt and another that would make it easier to erase debt incurred at bogus institutions – the Obama Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau brought enforcement actions that helped bring about the demise of flagrant abusers such as Corinthian Colleges and ITT Educational Services.

And this came after the Obama Administration pushed Congress to get commercial banks out of the student loan business.

Taken together, the Obama era measures against predatory for-profit education represent one of the rare instances in which government action targeted not just an illegitimate practice or a miscreant company but an entire industry. The message was not simply that for-profit colleges needed to be reformed but rather that they should not continue to exist. It was capital punishment for capital.

It comes as no surprise that the billionaire DeVos, who has had personal involvement with dubious business ventures, is seeking to undo the crackdown on for-profit colleges. And it is yet another example of how the Trump Administration is working against the interests of those lower-income voters who put him in office.

The same dynamic can be seen in the healthcare arena. The Republican “solution” to the problems of the Affordable Care Act is to make it easier for insurance companies to offer bare-bones junk insurance while dismantling Medicaid, both in its traditional form and its expansion under the ACA. The latest version of the Senate bill is willing to retain the hated taxes on high-income earners as long as the assault on the socialistic Medicaid program moves forward.

It appears that the right’s desire to protect the interests of corporations – including the most predatory – is even greater than its wish to redistribute income upward. Thus the one thing that Republicans have made sure to do with their stranglehold on the federal government has been to roll back as many business regulations as possible.

It remains to be seen how long Trump and Congressional Republicans can get away with telling their working class supporters that predatory corporations are the ones that deserve relief.

The Insurance Industry’s No-Lose Situation

Many voices are speaking out about the Republican effort to undo the Affordable Care Act, but one party diligently refrains from public comment: the insurance industry. While the industry is undoubtedly exerting its influence in the closed-door negotiations to restructure the wildly unpopular GOP bill, it is not airing those views more widely.

It doesn’t have to, because the healthcare debate between the two major parties is largely a disagreement on how best to serve the needs of Aetna, Anthem and the other big players.

The ACA, of course, was built on the premise that government should expand coverage largely by providing subsidies to help the uninsured purchase plans from private companies. When those companies became dissatisfied with the composition of their new client base and starting jacking up premiums in response, ACA supporters were put in the position of advocating for new insurer financial incentives.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are seeking to help the industry by rolling back Medicaid expansion and allowing it to return to the pre-Obamacare practice of selling bare-bones junk insurance, which would be the only kind that many people could afford after subsidies are decimated.

This is probably a no-lose situation for the insurers: either they get paid more to provide decent coverage or they are freed to sell highly profitable lousy plans.

All those legislators catering to insurers one way or the other are forgetting that healthcare reform was made necessary by the ruthless behavior of that same industry. If those companies had not been denying coverage whenever possible, it would not have been necessary for the ACA to set minimum standards. And if those firms had not been raising premiums relentlessly, it would not have been necessary for the ACA to take steps — which turned out to be inadequate — to try to restrain costs.

The industry’s unethical practices are not limited to the individual marketplace. The big insurers have also exploited the decision by policymakers to give them a foothold in the big federally funded programs: Medicaid and Medicare.

As Senate Republicans were cooking up their repeal and replace bill, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles joined two cases against one of the industry’s giants, UnitedHealth Group. The whistleblower suits accuse the company of systematically overcharging the federal government for services provided under the Medicare Advantage Program.

The complaints in the cases allege that UnitedHealth routinely scoured millions of medical records, searching for data it could use to make patients seem sicker than they actually were and thus justify bigger payments for the company, which was also accused of failing to correct invalid diagnoses made by providers. Either way, the complaints argue, UnitedHealth was bilking Medicare Advantage, which was created on the assumption that bringing the private sector into a government program would cut costs.

Such assumptions continue to afflict federal health policy as a whole. Too many members of Congress continue to worship the market in the face of all the evidence that the private insurance industry cannot be the foundation of a humane healthcare system.

The Crappy Coverage Solution

If Congressional Republicans succeed in enacting either the Senate or the House bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they will have carried out one of the most brazen bait and switch moves in the history of U.S. public policy.

They and Donald Trump campaigned on the idea that Obamacare exchange premiums were rising uncontrollably, yet neither of the bills does anything to address that problem. They did not vow to repeal and replace Medicaid — Trump, in fact, promised not to touch it or Medicare or Social Security — yet that is what the bills would in effect do, both for the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and traditional Medicaid.

It’s been widely noted that the Republicans seem preoccupied with repealing the taxes the ACA imposed on high earners to help pay for the cost of expanding coverage. Yet less attention is being paid to the other giveaway in the bills: the repeal of the ACA’s employer mandate. This provision should be called the Wal-Mart Windfall Act, because it would allow large low-road employers to avoid ACA rules that oblige firms with 50 or more full-time employees to provide health coverage or else pay a penalty.

The mandate is far from draconian, yet it was at least a partial remedy for the situation in which millions of workers at big-box retailers, fast-food outlets and similar workplaces were not provided affordable coverage and were encouraged to enroll in programs such as Medicaid. Now the Republicans seek to remove any obligation on the part of employers to provide coverage while also undermining the social safety net alternative.

To the extent that the Republicans have a solution to the healthcare problem it is this: bring back junk insurance. It is often forgotten that the ACA was designed not just to address the problem of the uninsured but also the underinsured.

Starting in the 1990s, large insurers such as Aetna began selling bare-bones individual policies to low-income individuals who did not get employer coverage and could not qualify for Medicaid. These policies had relatively low premiums but sky-high deductibles and numerous exclusions. In cases of a serious accident or illness, they were all but worthless. The ACA put an end to this predatory market by establishing a set of essential benefits that all plans would have to include.

Republicans don’t like to admit that they are promoting a return to crappy coverage, so they dress up their arguments with misleading phrases such as “patient-centered reforms.” Many of them also realized that the idea of lowering standards directly was not very popular, so they have returned to their favorite panacea of giving states more flexibility. This allows them to pretend they are not scrapping essential benefits while knowing that many governors and state legislatures would be all too willing to do so if given the opportunity.

The cynicism of Congressional Republicans is matched by that of the big insurance companies, for whom the ACA was tailored and are now doing nothing to defend the law. Instead, they still seem to be sulking about the two anti-competitive mergers (Aetna-Humana and Anthem-Cigna) that were opposed by Obama Administration and shot down in the courts. Having seen their oligopolistic dreams go up in smoke, they now seem to want to give up the ACA market in favor of selling bare-bones policies.

It is unclear whether the dystopian vision of the ACA opponents will come to pass, but in the meantime the wellbeing of millions of Americans is being unnecessarily endangered.

The Junk Insurance Lobby

The ACA repeal-and-replace effort, given up for dead two weeks ago, may or may not be getting resurrected. Whether that happens seems to depend on satisfying the desire of Tea Party Republicans to grant Americans the right to purchase the crappiest health coverage possible.

Whereas Paul Ryan and President Trump initially wanted to retain the ACA’s popular provisions on essential benefits and pre-existing conditions, they now seem open to trading them away to win over the Freedom Caucus.

The position of the hardliners is often dismissed as some kind of bizarre misanthropy, but it is actually the logical conclusion of the mainstream Republican notion that deregulation is the solution to all problems. That notion has been embraced by Trump, who repeatedly bashes agencies such as the EPA and claims that weakening business oversight is the key to job growth.

The members of the Freedom Caucus seem to believe that removing all restrictions on insurance companies will result in lower premium costs. That may be true but only because the insurance that people would be purchasing would cover as little as possible.

While the Freedom Caucus presents this as a bold new approach, it is really nothing more than a return to the situation before the enactment of the ACA. Republicans of all stripes would have us forget how awful and oppressive health insurance used to be.

Thirty years ago, the House Select Committee on Aging was warning that, in addition to the millions of Americans who were uninsured, millions more were underinsured. As traditional insurance was increasingly replaced by health maintenance organizations — whose business model was to deny as much coverage as possible — subscribers had to fight constantly to get prior approval for many procedures and to get reimbursed for medical fees already paid.

Even worse than the HMOs were the individual plans labeled as “limited benefit” or “mini-medical.” Targeted to lower-income people who were self-employed or had jobs that provided no coverage, these policies could cost as little as $40 a month but they had strict limits on both routine expenses and hospitalization costs. These plans existed for a long time on the fringes of the health insurance world, but eventually large companies such as Aetna, Cigna and UnitedHealth Group entered the market with their own bare-bones offerings.

Those subscribing to such plans were gambling they would remain healthy. If instead someone had a serious accident or illness, the plans were useless and often pushed people into personal bankruptcy.

Junk policies are the healthcare analogue to payday loans and other forms of predatory lending. They appear to serve a need and initially appear to be inexpensive, but they can have disastrous consequences.

The ACA was designed to protect people from those consequences, but the Obama Administration did not do enough to explain the change. In a climate of rightwing demagoguery, many people who had to give up their low-cost junk insurance were led to think they were losing something valuable. Moreover, Medicaid expansion, which provided free, decent coverage for low-wage workers who might otherwise have had to depend on junk policies, was blocked in many states for ideological reasons.

Now the Freedom Caucus would have us believe that bare-bones coverage is the way forward for the individual marketplace. That might be the case if we want a society in which those few people with no significant health needs get a bargain while everyone else has to risk financial ruin.

Catastrophic Plans

During his private-sector career Donald Trump floated many dubious business ventures, and now as president he is pushing his biggest bait-and-switch scheme yet. Having run for office on promises that he would improve healthcare and protect safety net programs such as Medicaid, he is now embracing and promoting a Republican replacement for the Affordable Care Act that would do exactly the opposite.

Throughout the campaign, Trump made it abundantly clear that he wanted to repeal the ACA, which he repeatedly described as a disaster, and with his typical hyperbole promised voters: “You’re going to have such great healthcare at a tiny fraction of the cost, and it is going to be so easy.” During the transition he said that the replacement plan would seek to provide “insurance for everybody.”

Trump exploited the real frustrations of many people with the ACA — frustrations that were largely the result of Republican intransigence that prevented the inclusion of a public option, blocked any legislative fixes and precluded Medicaid expansion in many states. He implicitly promised that a replacement plan would do more.

When Trump stated on February 27 that “nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” he was in effect signaling that the bait phase of his con was over and he was moving on to the switch. Now he has dropped the extravagant promises and has joined the House Republican rush to enact a repeal and replace plan supposedly made urgent by the imminent collapse of Obamacare.

The House legislation has not yet been officially scored by the Congressional Budget Office, but it is widely anticipated that it will result in a loss of coverage for millions of people and sharp increases in premiums for many of those who hold onto their plans.

Yet there is another issue that is receiving less attention: the quality of coverage for those who remain in the individual marketplace. For now, the Republican plan retains the ACA’s list of essential benefits (preventive care, etc.) that must be included in any individual or small group plan, but it is possible that could be bargained away to placate social conservatives who don’t like the provisions relating to reproductive health.

Trumpcare does not, however, include the ACA’s cost-sharing provisions that cap out-of-pocket expenses in plans obtained through the exchanges by persons with income below 250 percent of the federal poverty line. As a result, these people could very well be subjected to sharply higher deductibles and co-pays.

This points to the little-acknowledged aspect of the assault on the ACA: at the heart of the Republican “solution” to rising premiums is giving people the ability to purchase lower-cost but substandard coverage. In other words, they want to return to the pre-ACA situation in which insurers could sell bare-bones policies that provided little or no cost reimbursement except in cases of major illnesses or accidents — and might be skimpy in those situations as well.

It is significant that Republicans keep quoting Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini in perpetuating the bogus claim that the ACA is in a “death spiral.” Bertolini is hardly an objective observer. He used misleading negative comments about the ACA to try to deter the Obama Administration from its opposition to Aetna’s anti-competitive acquisition of its rival Humana, which was recently blocked by a federal judge who accused the company of dropping out of the ACA marketplace in several states to “improve its litigation position” in the merger dispute.

Aetna is also the company that was one of the biggest promoters of bare-bones policies in the pre-ACA period. It got into the business, also known as junk health insurance, two decades ago through the purchase of U.S. Healthcare, an HMO whose bare-knuckles practices Aetna adopted in full and thus found itself the target of a series of class-action lawsuits brought by patients as well as providers.

The substandard policies sold by Aetna made up a substantial portion of the plans that were banned by the ACA. The people who had to give up that “coverage” became symbols of the supposed oppression of Obamacare.

Although they try hard to hide the fact, Republicans — and now Trump — are setting the stage for a resurgence of the bare-bones policies under the banner of affordability. That will be catastrophic coverage in every sense of the word.

Aetna’s Deception and the ACA Crisis

One of the decisive moments in the 2016 election campaign came last summer, when major insurance companies cut back their involvement in the Affordable Care Act exchanges after claiming they were losing money in the market. This was seized on by Trump and other Republicans to further denigrate the ACA and argue the need for repeal and replace.

Evidence has now emerged suggesting that the insurers’ claims were more of the lies that tainted the whole campaign and that those lies were motivated by an attempt to influence the federal government’s policy on mergers.

What was often overlooked during discussions of the health insurance industry last year was that the biggest concern of the major firms was the fate of their attempt to capture greater market share through giant acquisitions. Aetna was seeking to acquire Humana, and Anthem wanted to join forces with Cigna. The two proposed deals, worth about $85 billion, would reduce the number of major players to three (the other being UnitedHealth).

The Obama Administration and multiple states challenged the mergers, which ended up in court. Recently a federal district court judge sided with the Justice Department in the Aetna-Humana case; another judge is expected to rule soon on the Anthem-Cigna deal.

In his 158-page ruling on the Aetna matter, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates cited evidence indicating that the company’s decision to leave ACA exchanges in 17 counties in three states (Florida, Georgia and Missouri) was designed to “improve its litigation position.” In other words, its main reason for dropping out was not the profitability of those markets but rather the attempt to make it more likely that the Humana acquisition would be approved.

The opinion reveals (on p.125) that when Aetna met with officials at the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services prior to the filing of the government’s complaint it “connected this lawsuit with its future participation in the exchanges” and threatened (p.126) to withdraw from those exchanges if the merger were not approved.

Also included in the opinion is an excerpt (p.127) from an e-mail in which Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini stated that “the administration has a very short memory, absolutely no loyalty and a very thin skin.” Asked in a deposition what he meant by that, Bertolini expressed resentment that the administration was opposing the merger despite Aetna’s role in supporting the ACA during the battle over its enactment.

The judge went on to cite (p.129) internal company e-mails in which, in the words of the opinion, “Aetna executives tried to conceal from discovery in this litigation the reasoning behind their recommendation to withdraw from the 17 complaint counties.” That effort was unsuccessful.

Overall, the court found that the exchange counties from which Aetna was withdrawing were a mix of profitable and unprofitable ones, thus undermining the claim that the move was purely a business decision.

While Aetna’s deception failed to sway the government or the lawsuit, it had a significant political impact amid a heated campaign. Now that the campaign is over and the ACA opponents prevailed, Aetna and the other insurance giants are staying silent as Republicans move to gut the law.

It’s unclear whether the firms expect the exchanges to survive in some form or they are rooting for a return to the old days of minimal regulation. In either event, it’s clear that companies like Aetna and Anthem are putting their desire for oligopolistic control above all else.

False Claims and Other Frauds

ViolationTracker_Logo_Development_R3 The False Claims Act sounds like the name of a Donald Trump comedy routine, but it is actually a 150-year-old law that is widely used to prosecute companies and individuals that seek to defraud the federal government. It is also the focus of the latest expansion of Violation Tracker, the database of corporate crime and misconduct we produce at the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First. The resource now contains 112,000 entries from 30 federal regulatory agencies and all divisions of the Justice Department. The cases account for some $300 billion in fines and settlements.

Through the addition of some 750 False Claims Act and related cases resolved since the beginning of 2010, we were able to identify the biggest culprits in this category. Drug manufacturers, hospital systems, insurers and other healthcare companies have paid nearly $7 billion in fines and settlements. Banks, led by Wells Fargo, account for the second largest portion of False Claims Act penalties, with more than $3 billion in payments. More than one-third of the 100 largest federal contractors have been defendants in such cases during the seven-year period.

Among the newly added cases involving healthcare companies, the largest is the $784 million settlement the Justice Department reached last April with Pfizer and its subsidiary Wyeth to resolve allegations that they overcharged the Medicaid program. DaVita HealthCare Partners, a leading dialysis provider, was involved in the next two largest cases, in which it had to pay a total of $800 million to resolve allegations that it engaged in wasteful practices and paid referral kickbacks while providing services covered under Medicare and other federal health programs.

Wells Fargo accounts for the largest banking-related penalty and the largest False Claims Act case overall in the new data: a $1.2 billion settlement earlier this year to resolve allegations that the bank falsely certified to the Department of Housing and Urban Development that certain residential home mortgage loans were eligible for Federal Housing Administration insurance, with the result that the government had to pay FHA insurance claims when some of those loans defaulted.

Thirty-five of the 100 largest federal contractors (in FY2015) have paid fines or settlements totaling $1.8 billion in False Claims Act-related cases since the beginning of 2010. The biggest contractor, Lockheed Martin, paid a total of $50 million in four cases, while number two Boeing paid a total of $41 million in two cases.

The database has also added new search features, such as the ability to search by 49 different types of offenses, ranging from mortgage abuses to drug safety violations. Users can view summary pages for each type of offense, showing which parent companies have the most penalties in the category. Penalty summary pages for parents, industries and agencies now also contain tables showing the most common offenses. Users can add one or more offense type to other variables in their searches.

Among types of offenses, the largest penalty total comes from cases involving the packaging and sale of toxic securities in the period leading up to the financial meltdown in 2008. The top-ten primary case types are as follows:

Toxic securities abuses: $68 billion
Environmental violations: $63 billion
Mortgage abuses: $43 billion
Other banking violations: $18 billion
Economic sanction violations: $14 billion
Off-label/unapproved promotion of medical products: $12 billion
False Claims Act cases: $11 billion
Consumer protection violations: $9 billion
Interest rate benchmark manipulation: $7 billion
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases: $6 billion

We also added a feature allowing for searches limited to companies linked to parent companies with specific ownership structures such as publicly traded, privately held, joint venture, non-profit and employee-owned. That’s in addition to updating the data from the agencies already covered and increasing the size of the parent company universe to 2,165.

The uproar over the Wells Fargo sham accounts scandal is heightening the discussion of corporate crime. Violation Tracker hopes to be a tool in efforts to turn that discussion into lasting change.

Insurers Show Their True Colors

healthcare-profits One of the key building blocks of the Affordable Care Act was the notion that insurance companies would compete with one another to offer good deals to the uninsured once that population was required to purchase coverage. That captive market is not working out as well as hoped.

Just the other day, Aetna became the last of the five major national carriers to project a loss on ACA business for 2016 while announcing the cancellation of a planned expansion of its participation in the ACA state exchanges and a reevaluation of its current involvement. This came in the wake of recent news that UnitedHealth and Humana would also be cutting back on their exchange offerings.

These carriers attributed their moves to higher than expected medical costs among exchange participants. For all the talk about a reformed health insurance industry, the companies still operate according to a perverse dynamic. They make money when more people don’t seek healthcare services. The insurers can’t get away with many of the tricks they used in the past to deny coverage, but they can still walk away from certain market segments such as ACA plans when profits are not as high as they would like.

The steps by Aetna and the others will intensify what is already a dwindling amount of competition in some of the state exchanges. Several are in a situation in which only one insurer is expected to offer marketplace plans. The result is a kind of single payer situation, though not in the good sense.

All of this is happening while the major insurers have been trying to diminish competition in another way — by trying to merge with one another. Aetna has been seeking to acquire Humana, and Anthem wants to join forces with Cigna. The two proposed deals, totaling about $85 billion, would reduce the number of major players to three.

Last month, the Justice Department and multiple states filed challenges to the two proposed mergers. It is unclear to what extent Aetna’s announcement about a pullback in the exchanges is meant to put pressure on the Obama Administration to back off from its opposition to the Humana deal.

What is clear is that Aetna has a long history of using hard-ball tactics dating back to its purchase of the notorious HMO U.S. Healthcare two decades ago. Aetna tried to apply some of the worst features of managed care — including bare-bones policies — to its health insurance business and ended up with a wave of litigation and regulatory violations. An attempt by plaintiff lawyers to bring a massive tobacco-industry-type case against the industry failed, but Aetna did have to pay $470 million to settle a class-action suit brought by physicians over inadequate payments.

Aetna’s track record was one of the main pieces of evidence showing the folly of the decision by the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats to shun single payer (or even the public option) and embrace the big insurers. That Faustian choice is coming back to haunt the Dems, who are now trying to resurrect the public option. It may be too late.

Manufacturing McJobs at Nissan and Elsewhere

Bring back manufacturing jobs: For years this has been put forth as the silver bullet that would reverse the decline in U.S. living standards and put the economy back on a fast track. The only problem is that today’s production positions are not our grandparents’ factory jobs. In fact, they are often as substandard as the much reviled McJobs of the service sector.

The latest evidence of this comes in a report by the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, which has issued a series of studies on how the growth of poorly paid jobs in retailing and fast food have burdened government with ever-rising social safety net costs. Now the Center shows how the same problem arises from the deterioration of job quality in manufacturing. The study estimates that one-third of the families of frontline production workers have to resort to one or more safety net program and that the federal government and the states have been spending about $10 billion a year on their benefits.

What makes these hidden taxpayer costs all the more galling is that manufacturing companies enjoy special benefits in the federal tax code and receive lavish state and local economic development subsidies, the rationale for which is that the financial assistance supposedly helps create high-quality jobs.

The Center’s analysis deals in aggregates and thus does not single out individual companies, but it is not difficult to think of specific firms that contribute to the vicious cycle. A suitable poster child, it seems to me, is Nissan. It is one of those foreign carmakers credited with investing in U.S. manufacturing, though like the other transplants it did so in a pernicious way.

First, it tried to avoid being unionized by locating its facilities in states such as Mississippi and Tennessee that are known to be unfriendly to organized labor. After the United Auto Workers nonetheless launched an organizing drive, the company has done everything possible to thwart the union.

Second, while boasting that its hourly wage rates for permanent, full-time workers are close to those of the Big Three domestic automakers, Nissan has denied those pay levels to large chunks of its workforce. Roughly half of those working at the company’s plant in Canton, Mississippi are temps or leased workers with much lower pay and little in the way of benefits.

It is significant that in the Center’s report, Mississippi — which has also attracted manufacturing investments from other foreign firms such as Toyota and Yokohama Rubber — has the highest rate of participation (59 percent) in safety net programs by families of production workers. The Magnolia State may have experienced a manufacturing revival, but many of those new jobs are so poorly paid that they are creating a burden for taxpayers.

At the same time, Mississippi is among the more generous states in dishing out the subsidies to those foreign investors. My colleague Kasia Tarczynska and I discovered that the value of the incentive package given to Nissan in 2000 will turn out to cost $1.3 billion — far more than was originally reported. Toyota got a $354 million deal in 2007, and Yokohama Rubber got a $130 million one in 2013.

There’s a lot of talk these days about bad trade deals and resulting job losses. We also need to worry about what happens when we gain employment from international investment but the jobs turn out to be lousy ones.

Johnson & Johnson’s Self-Inflicted Wounds

Baby powder, the product along with Band-Aids that for decades gave Johnson & Johnson a benign image, is now the latest symbol of its deterioration into one of the most unreliable of large corporations. Juries have recently awarded a total of $127 million to women with ovarian cancer who charge that their disease was caused by the talc in the company’s powder.

J&J, which disputes the allegations and is appealing the verdicts, faces some 1,400 additional similar lawsuits brought by plaintiffs’ lawyers armed with company documents they say show that J&J was concerned about a link between talcum powder and ovarian cancer as early as the 1970s. It is unclear what will happen with the litigation, but the lawsuits are part of a long string of scandals that have plagued the giant medical products firm during the past decade and forced it to pay out vast sums in civil settlements and criminal fines.

The most serious of those cases involved allegations that several of its subsidiaries marketed prescription drugs for purposes not approved as safe by the Food and Drug Administration, thus creating potentially life-threatening risks for patients.

In 2010 J&J subsidiaries Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical and Ortho-McNeil-Janssen had to pay $81 million to settle charges that they promoted their epilepsy drug Topamax for uses not approved as safe. The following year, J&J subsidiary Scios Inc. had to pay $85 million to settle similar charges relating to its heart failure drug Natrecor.

In 2013 the Justice Department announced that J&J and several of its subsidiaries would pay more than $2.2 billion in criminal fines and civil settlements to resolve allegations that the company had marketed it anti-psychotic medication Risperdal and other drugs for unapproved uses as well as allegations that they had paid kickbacks to physicians and pharmacists to encourage off-label usage. The amount included $485 million in criminal fines and forfeiture and $1.72 billion in civil settlements with both the federal government and 45 states that had also sued the company.

At a press conference announcing the resolution of the case, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the company’s practices ”recklessly put at risk the health of some of the most vulnerable members of our society — including young children, the elderly and the disabled.”

Other J&J problems resulted from faulty production practices. During 2009 and 2010 the company had to announce around a dozen recalls of medications, contact lenses and hip implants. The most serious of these was the massive recall of liquid Tylenol and Motrin for infants and children after batches of the medication were found to be contaminated with metal particles.

The company’s handling of the matter was so poor that J&J subsidiary McNeil-PPC became the subject of a criminal investigation and later entered a guilty plea and paid a criminal fine of $20 million and forfeited $5 million.

J&J also faced criminal charges in an investigation of questionable foreign transactions. In 2011 it agreed to pay a $21.4 million criminal penalty as part of a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department resolving allegations of improper payments by J&J subsidiaries to government officials in Greece, Poland and Romania in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The settlement also covered kickbacks paid to the former government of Iraq under the United Nations Oil for Food Program.

All of this has been a humiliating comedown for a company that was once regarded as a model of corporate social responsibility and which set the standard for crisis management in its handling of the 1980s episode in which a madman laced packages of Tylenol with cyanide. While the company was then being victimized, the more recent crises have been largely of its own making.

—————————-

Note: This piece is drawn from my new Corporate Rap Sheet on Johnson & Johnson, which can be found here.