Charity or profitable marketing?
Charities helping lower-income patients pay for expensive drugs.
Worthy and noble, right?
That’s exactly what attorneys for Good Days, a patient-assistance charity, will try to prove in courts.
Good Days (formerly Chronic Disease Fund) receives donations from large drug makers such as
Bayer, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, and others.
Good Days and its attorneys will try to prove that the charity is independent of its donors.
That no drug-maker donor can influence what medicine is covered under its co-pay assistance programs.
The attorneys won’t have an easy job.
Why?
According to an IRS’ analysis of the charity’s records:
90 percent to a full 100 percent of its co-payments support went to patients taking drugs made by the very company that donated the money.
Charity or profitable marketing?
When the court day arrives, attorneys from each side will try to make their case:
One side will say how much the patients benefited by being helped to pay for medicine they couldn’t otherwise afford.
The other side will say that, by helping patients pay for expensive medicine, the drug-maker donors help themselves
to collect millions of dollars from Medicare.
And that this in fact is a profitable marketing strategy for the donors.
Charity or profitable marketing — what do you think?
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