In early 2015, an Insys Therapeutics employee called an insurer and provided misleading patient information in order to win clearance for a prescription for its Subsys painkiller. The conversation — in which the employee pretended to call from a physician’s office — was about a woman named Sarah Fuller, whose family later claimed she died because she was inappropriately prescribed the drug.
The phone call was made scarcely a year after a consultant warned the drug maker that it lacked needed policies for governing such activities, but Insys executives failed to take corrective action, according to U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who released a copy of the consultant’s report and a recording of the phone call as part of an ongoing investigation into the opioid crisis.
“There were no steps taken to put some kind of quality control process in place. Which, to me, is the sign of a company that wasn’t really interested in fixing the kind of problem that you see in this phone call,” McCaskill said in a press conference Wednesday, “since the audit uncovered it and they did nothing to address it at that point.”
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