The Industry Veteran is right. Don’t bother with expensive degrees or clever busines planning. Just get close to an organization (preferably in it) that can’t keep its hand out of the cookie jar, and nail them by letting the Feds know. It works for PBMs, and even better for drug companies — to the tune of $26m for this go-round, with Glaxo as the fall guy. Frankly this one looks pretty dumb. Didn’t Glaxo note exacty the same thing was pulled on TAP not so long ago?
Meanwhile in this list of the top 20 Fraud settlements of all time, health care companies get to star in 16 of the top 20! And that’s before Part D comes into effect!
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Of course you have to have a lawyer up front and hope the company doesn’t have the gall to try to frame you for it. And that the media doesn’t decide to cooperate with the company. I was just listed among “identity theft” cases in the Mercury News: when I wrote to point out that I didn’t steal anything – I linked to a public web site, the corrections editor told me that he didn’t see what “merited” correction. As his “evidence”, he pointed to earlier articles that had fallen for Kaiser’s early PR spin.
Perhaps this would all be different if I had received whistleblower protection up front. I did try to consult a lawyer, including through these people: http://www.whistleblowers.org/
However, no one bothered with me. And after the fact, the OCR denied me whistleblower status after “talking to Kaiser”, as if Kaiser was their client!!!
For the record, I’ve had almost zero luck getting help from Federal agencies in general. In a few cases, they even have policies that they don’t get back to you, so you never know whether they are looking into the situation or not.