Tag: should
Where to Spend Your Healthcare Investment Dollars
In a blog entry written over the summer, I expressed the view that the next 5-10 years will present tremendous transactional opportunities in the life sciences/health care industry. Nothing has happened to dampen that view. In fact, President Obama’s reelection, which means that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is here to stay and will be fully implemented over the next few years, and our ongoing deficit reduction concerns, mandate that efficiency, cost control and strategic ways to provide better quality healthcare will be at center stage. So let’s focus in on some investment opportunities that may be interesting.
For those willing to tackle regulatory and reimbursement hurdles, there should be many opportunities in the provider world. This could take the form of hospital mergers and consolidations, spin-off of various medical and lab services that have been provided at hospitals and … Read More »
Pharmaceutical Industry Executives Face Enforcement Risks Under The Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine
The recent decision of the D.C. Circuit in Friedman v. Sebelius, No. 11-5028 (D.C. Cir. July 27, 2012), demonstrates the enforcement risk to pharmaceutical and medical device industry executives under the “responsible corporate officer” (RCO) doctrine. Under the RCO doctrine, officers, managers and in-house counsel employed by life sciences companies could face misdemeanor criminal liability and exclusion from Medicare and other federal health programs, even if they were not personally involved in wrongdoing. Indeed, an executive can be liable under the RCO doctrine even if they did not know that their organization had engaged in wrongdoing, so long as the executive should have known of the organization misconduct by virtue of the executive’s position within the organization.
The RCO doctrine originated in United States v. Dotterweich, 320 U.S. 277 (1943), in which the Supreme Court upheld the misdemeanor conviction of the president of a … Read More »
The FTC Finally Issues its Report on Consumer Privacy
Interactive marketing is everywhere, and the Federal Trade Commission has struggled mightily over the past several years to deal with complex privacy issues that grow out of sophisticated, data-intensive marketing practices. On March 26, the FTC released its long-promised final report on consumer privacy. Critically, we now have a sense of the FTC staff position on future legislation, best practices and the secondary market in customer data.
The FTC was clear that it wants additional legislation to address general privacy concerns, data security and breach notifications. This is a change from the staff’s prior position that self-regulation would be sufficient, and lends weight to current efforts before congress to do exactly that (although the fact that we are currently in a highly partisan election year does diminish the likelihood of immediate action).
The rest of the report flowed logically from the principles … Read More »