If companies are people, my friend, like Mitt Romney famously described in Iowa in August 2011, then we’re feeling a little bad for our fellow person called Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a division of health care giant Johnson & Johnson.
They just got dinged with a $158 million settlement in a Medicaid fraud case in Texas for “making false or misleading statements about the safety, cost and effectiveness of the expensive anti-psychotic medication Risperdal, and improperly influencing officials and doctors to push the drug.”
But we won’t feel too badly, because Janssen got off easy with this one. They don’t have to admit to any liability with the settlement, and Johnson & Johnson — who made billions off of the sale of Risperdal — will barely blink their corporate eyeballs as they make out the check.
With the economy going nowhere fast in the U.S., more and more unemployed workers are looking toward endless unemployment with little hope for their future.