Opioid maker caught on tape lying to push deadly drug on patient

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Drew Angerer )

Opioid makers have been accused-and in many cases convicted-of doing all sorts of shady things to get people on highly addictive, often deadly opioid pain medications and spurring the devastating epidemic the country is now facing. They've allegedly greased doctors into writing unnecessary prescriptions, hidden and misled everyone on the drugs' addictiveness, and looked the other way as large orders of opioids made their way to the black market.

But an investigation led by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), the top-ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, adds a new seedy tidbit to the list: posing as doctors' offices and straight-up lying to insurers to get deadly, powerful opioids covered for patients who don't need them. In an audio file and report (PDF) released Wednesday by McCaskill, that's exactly what you can hear a representative of Insys Therapeutics doing.

In the recording, the Insys rep is working to circumvent a so-called "prior authorization process" that insurers use to weed out unnecessary or abusive prescribing. In this case, the Insys rep wanted to get the Insys drug, Subsys, approved and covered for a patient in New Jersey named Sarah Fuller.

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