How one woman took on ‘Big Pharma' and (mostly) won

Yahoo

2 days ago

As a sales rep for drug manufacturers Questcor, Lisa Pratta always suspected the company's business practices weren't just immoral but illegal, too, as she explains in 'False Claims — One Insider's Impossible Battle Against Big Pharma Corruption' (William Morrow).
But this was the final straw.
At a patient event in Freehold, NJ, in August 2011, a young woman walking with a cane asked Pratta if the drug she sold, Acthar, could help with her multiple sclerosis. When the woman mentioned she was a mother to two babies and also had been diagnosed with lymphoma, Pratta broke down.
'I couldn't say anything,' Pratta tells The Post. 'I just went to the ladies' room and cried.
'And that was the turning point. I knew my days of keeping my mouth shut were over.'
Pratta began working for Questcor in 2010 as the sales rep in the Northeast region for Acthar, a drug which helped relieve autoimmune and inflammatory disorders. 'If prescribed correctly, Acthar could help people walk again. And talk again,' writes Pratta.
But, she adds, 'Questcor made more money when it was prescribed incorrectly.'
They would do anything to sell Acthar.
From paying doctors to prescribe it to using bogus research studies proclaiming its miraculous efficacy, they were so successful that Achtar's price rose from $40 per vial in 2000 to nearly $39,000 in 2019 — an increase of 97,000%.
Pratta's determination to do the right thing was partly the result of a traumatic childhood tainted by physical and sexual abuse.
'I had to fight for myself and develop that inner strength,' she says. 'I needed tenacity.'
That tenacity was put to the test when Pratta began to uncover the extent of Questcor's corruption.
Some sales reps were making up to $4 million a year and, in turn, kept the physicians doing their bidding in a life of luxury. 'The greed had just taken over. They took them on scuba diving trips and bought clothes and shoes for their wives. One guy bought his doctor a brand new Armani suit and expensed it to Questcor,' she recalls.
'And I'm going to TJ Maxx to buy my shoes.'
Though she had deliberated about exposing Questcor, Pratta worried about the ramifications. 'That's all I could think about,' she says. 'I was a single parent, mother of a special needs son and had a ton of debt from my divorce.
'The last thing I needed was to be fired and homeless.'
The impetus to act came from former colleague, Pete Keller, who, also concerned about Questcor's methods, had decided to tell the authorities.
Now he needed Pratta, who was still working there, to act as a 'relator' and feed information to lawyers, including health care fraud attorneys Marc Orlow and Ross Begelman.
To make the case, Pratta compiled as much evidence as possible, surreptitiously making notes at sales meetings and patient programs.
'I used to write notes on the palm of my hand under the table,' she explains. 'If I was at a cocktail party and somebody confessed what they were doing was bribery, I would write it on a napkin in the bathroom or even on my pants.
'I ruined a lot of suits.'
Given the financial might of the industry she was battling, Pratta became acutely aware of her own safety.
Before she turned whistleblower, Pratta researched other relators to see what happened to them. 'Just to see if anybody was murdered,' she explains. 'You know, a mysterious accident or a car blowing up.'
Consequently, she become hyper-vigilant.
'I would see cars sitting at the end of my block and I just got paranoid,' she says. 'I was watching even more when I went in stores or the parking lot. I got a dashcam, too.'
In January 2012, the Department of Justice began a preliminary investigation into Questcor. Soon, federal agents began calling at Pratta's colleagues' homes and she had to feign shock. But, she writes, 'If I was the only one in the company who didn't get an early-morning visit from the Feds, that wasn't exactly helping me keep my cover.'
Soon, Pratta's clandestine role became second nature to her. 'It didn't feel like I was still working for the government. It was like being married to my ex — they were never around, and there was no communication,' she writes.
After Questcor was acquired by Irish pharma-giant Mallinckrodt in 2014, pressure to deliver even higher sales increased exponentially and with it came even greater disregard for ethics.
In 2017, after she was repeatedly bullied by her boss, Pratta went to HR to complain but was fired soon after, although they maintained it was a corporate restructure, just to avoid a wrongful termination case.
'Ironically, I wasn't fired because I was a double agent feeding information to the Department of Justice. Instead, they got rid of me for the offense of daring to speak out about an abusive manager,' she writes.
In March 2019, the Department of Justice served a 100-page lawsuit against Mallinckrodt, alleging illegal marketing of Acthar, bribing doctors to boost sales and defrauding government health care programs
It also mentioned Pratta's role in the case, meaning her long-held anonymity was now public knowledge.
'I didn't mind that my former bosses knew; I just wished I could have seen their faces when they put it all together. I hoped they felt that their lives were suddenly out of their control.
'The way the Acthar patients felt.'
In the wake of the lawsuit, Mallinckrodt filed for bankruptcy, a move which immediately halted all legal action against them, much to Pratta's frustration.
Worse still, a member of the New Jersey plumbers' union with MS had his union file a class action lawsuit against Mallinckrodt — and, as Pratta's identity was now revealed, and she was a New Jersey resident, he named her in it.
While four of the five defendants were companies, Pratta was the only individual named.
'The plumbers' union was not messing around,' she writes. 'They were pissed, and rightly so. In 2018, they'd paid $26,100.28 for one dose of Acthar for one of its members.'
While that lawsuit against Pratta was ultimately thrown out, 'by the time it was finally dismissed, I was left with almost $42,000 in attorneys' fees,' she says.
Nor did Pratta receive anywhere near the amount of compensation she could have been entitled to as a whistleblower.
When Mallinckrodt settled out of court in March 2022, agreeing to pay just $26.3 million for violating the False Claims Act — far less than the amount had the case reached trial — it meant Pratta's percentage share was even smaller.
Worse still, it would now be paid in installments, once a year for the next eight years. 'In reality, if I averaged it all out, it was as if I'd just stayed employed for another ten years instead of losing my job,' she reflects.
For Pratta, though, the long, expensive journey to justice had been worth all the anxiety and sleepless nights.
In fact, she has no regrets whatsoever about doing what she did.
'Now I sleep like a baby,' she laughs.