Merck Whistleblower: ‘I’ll Probably Buy Merck Stock’

William St. John LaCorte, a specialist in geriatric and internal medicine in Metairie, Louisiana, has a reputation as a whistleblower. “Some people think I’m a pathological serial qui tam relator. I can’t help it. I run across people who run widespread corporate scams while most of us are trying to deal with patients,” he tells the Associated Press.

In the Merck case that was settled last week, he expects to receive anywhere from 15 percent to 25 percent of the $250 million settlement between Merck and federal and state governments over his whistleblower lawsuit (the other lawsuit and interest accounts for the $670 million figure you saw in the headlines last week). After legal fees and taxes are subtracted, he’ll get between $10 million and $15 million.

Just the same, he doesn’t intend to give up caring for the elderly in nursing homes and hospitals. “My life is probably too interesting to retire,” he tells the AP, as recounts his legal adventures. “What the heck would I do?”

LaCorte, 59, is the son and grandson of lawyers in Cranford, NJ, near a large Merck research and productino facility. His grandfather was a judge; his father a legislator whose district included Rahway. Before that election, he tells the AP, “My father was a small-town mayor…which I guess made me believe that I was responsible for taking action if there was a problem. The buck stops there.”

His first whistleblower suit, in 1993, was against Roche Biomedical Laboratories. “I’d walk into the nursing homes and 90-year-old patients were getting multiple cardiac risk profiling done every month, which I never ordered,” he says. Roche’s successor, Laboratory Corp. of America, agreed in 1996 to pay the federal government $187 million in civil and criminal penalties in suits filed by LaCorte and three other people around the country. LaCorte says he was awarded $2.5 million before taxes and 40 percent attorneys’ fees, and pocketed about $900,000.

“Filing a qui tam (whistleblower lawsuit) is a very technical thing. We made a lot of technical errors,” he said. “We didn’t get as much for ourselves as we might have, but I think we cleaned up the lab industry.”

In 1996, he sued SmithKline Beecham but people who filed suit earlier shared a $52 million payment. The appeal filed by LaCorte and others helped establish a rule that “the first to file could trump any other suit in terms of paying the relator,” LaCorte says. “I’m sort of famous for that.”

Last March, he settled a suit filed in 2002 against pharmaceutical services company AmerisourceBergen Corp. for $250,000 in legal fees. The suit accused PharMerica, a subsidiary since spun off, of taking payments to recommend specific drugs for nursing home patients rather than the most cost-effective drugs, he says.

The Justice Department hadn’t joined that suit, he said. “Hurricane Katrina came along. I was involved in evacuating up to 629 nursing home residents to Baton Rouge and bringing them back, and lost most of my staff, including my nurse practitioner. I thought it was more important to put my practice back together than litigate the case.” The company had agreed to donate $100,000 in LaCorte’s name to his son’s high school, he tells the AP, but the government and some of LaCorte’s lawyers opposed that, and he let it go.

He sued Merck in 1999 after finding hospitals were substituting Pepcid, then a prescription-only drug, for the antacids he prescribed - and that a number of patients getting Pepcid, including an uncle, had become confused and agitated. The drugmaker was charging 10 cents a pill to hospitals which made Pepcid prescriptions 85 percent of their antacid total, with the idea that patients would continue taking the drug as outpatients. At the same time, Medicaid was billed $1.65 per pill. Merck spokesman Ronald Rogers says the program ended in 2001. “So we’re talking about something that’s in the distant past.”

LaCorte says he feels whistleblower suits should be a last resort, and tried for years to stop the Pepcid practice before going to court. He made records of prescription changes, and of whether patients were having mental problems that ended when they were taken off Pepcid. They had too much of the drug in their system - something that occurs because people lose kidney function as they age, and Pepcid is excerted via the kidneys, he tells the AP. “Since Pepcid is fat-soluble, it will go to the brain.”

LaCorte said he got the judge to take that information out from under the secrecy usually reserved for such lawsuits. “I said to my attorneys, `We’ve got a problem here. We’ve got patient harm. I don’t want it to appear I’m sitting on data indicating patient harm to get a qui tam.’” He also went to Republican US Reps. Bob Livingston and David Vitter, R-La., (now a senator), and US Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, to get the info to the FDA.

“The FDA looked at the data and said, `You’re right. This is an overdose situation. Too much is being given to the elderly.’ So we got the package insert changed.”

If he’s not planning to retire, what does he plan to do with all that money? Charities, mostly, he said - his church, schools, foundations that run Touro Infirmary in New Orleans and East Jefferson General Hospital in Metairie. “They were ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and are having difficulty providing services,” he said.

“I’ll probably buy some Merck stock,” he tells the AP, “because I think it’s a good company.”

Source: Associated Press