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Fourteen doctors and other medical professionals were among those charged in fraud schemes that totaled $258 million in California, Oregon and Arizona...Charges were brought...against 34 people for alleged Medicare and Medicaid fraud…The charges targeted schemes billing Medicare and Medicaid for services, testing, and prescriptions that were not medically necessary or not actually provided to beneficiaries...READ MORE

Jaime Rosenberg, welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network

Nicole Grassano, PTNN, Pharmacy Week in Review, this weekly video program provides our readers with an in-depth review of the latest news, product approvals, FDA rulings and more.

An independent expert panel to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration...recommended approval of GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s over-the-counter nicotine oral spray that aims to help smokers quit their addiction...The panel...saying its benefits as a smoking cessation aid outweighed risks. The FDA usually follows the recommendations of its experts, but is not mandated to do so...Panel members also raised concerns regarding the potential for abuse and misuse of the product by non-smokers and teenagers...READ MORE

Pinder Sahota has a list, and he is checking it twice. As the U.K. lurches toward Brexit, the Novo Nordisk scientist has become a logistics expert to ensure there is no break in the insulin supply chain when the separation finally happens...The company has tripled its warehouse capacity and stuffed it with 3.8 million packs of insulin, enough to last more than four months. New routes have been plotted to avoid the ports and crossings expected to be the most congested...READ MORE

Recent New and Generic Drug Approvals

This report displays final approvals and tentative approvals of original and supplemental applications for the two weeks beginning on the earliest date listed below. Some approvals may be added to the Drugs@FDA database after this timespan. For comprehensive approval reports, please use the monthly "All Approvals" report on Drugs@FDA.

Big M&A has returned to pharma smack in the middle of a fierce drug pricing debate—and a group of senators is urging the Federal Trade Commission to weigh those deals accordingly...Of particular interest? AbbVie's proposed $63 billion Allergan buyout and Bristol-Myers Squibb's Celgene merger...M&A has been picking up across the economy...pharma included. And specifically in the drug industry, “consolidation is occurring against a backdrop of ever-rising prescription drug spending and reports that one in four people taking prescription drugs have difficulty affording their medication,” ...READ MORE

The bootleg medications were smuggled across the border and sold to mostly Latino immigrants in public spaces throughout Los Angeles — at swap meets, parks, beauty salons and makeshift stands outside mom-and-pop grocery stores...The drugs were cheap, and the customers — mostly from Mexico and Central America — did not need prescriptions to buy them. Some of the products featured brand names and colorful packaging that immigrants knew well from their home countries…Many were sheer counterfeits. Others, though legal south of the border, were not approved for sale in the United States. Some had expired. Still others would have been legal if sold by people licensed to do so — but none of the sellers held pharmacist licenses or any other medical credential...READ MORE

The top U.S. consumer and trade regulator said...it had warned three companies selling products infused with cannabidiol that it was illegal to advertise that such products could fight disease without providing credible scientific evidence...CBD, has been touted as alleviating countless physical ailments...The Federal Trade Commission said the three unidentified companies claimed, without providing substantiation, that CBD can treat more than two dozen conditions including cancer, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, epilepsy, diabetes, psoriasis, and AIDS...READ MORE

States are seeking to try value-based payment models to mitigate high drug costs, but there are plenty of barriers to implementing these programs…Several states have rolled out outcomes-based or population-based models for drug pricing in Medicaid. Louisiana and Washington, for example, operate “Netflix-style” subscription models for hepatitis C drugs. States such as Michigan and Oklahoma are testing outcomes-based approaches...“This is just really new territory for a lot of these states to even interact with manufacturers this way—knowing just the right mechanisms and the right way to begin these conversations,”…there are few models to learn from, and taking lessons from one another can also be a challenge...READ MORE