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【技术产业】美敦力又遭处罚
Medtronic Is Fined for Obfuscation, Calls for Openness
Posted by Jacob Goldstein
Health Blog juxtaposition of the day:
1. A federal judge fined Medtronic $10 million for mounting a legal defense in a patent infringement trial “that threatened to mislead and confuse the jury,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. The case, brought by Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy division, resulted in a $226 million judgment against medical device maker Medtronic.
“The defendants prolonged the proceedings unnecessarily” and tried to “obscure, evade or minimize” a previous federal court ruling in the case, the judge reportedly wrote. The company, which plans to appeal the fine, says that “all trial issues were properly litigated by Medtronic’s counsel,” according to a statement cited by the Star Tribune.
2. Medtronic said today that it supports increased transparency in the medical device industry. In a statement released ahead of tomorrow’s Senate hearing on medical device makers’ payments to surgeons, the company said a bill that would require industry to disclose financial ties to physicians should be more strict than currently proposed. The legislation shouldn’t apply only to giants like Medtronic, the company said:
[T]he bill can and should go even further by requiring the same level of disclosure by all companies in the industry, regardless of size and including those companies owned in whole or in part by physicians. Companies with yearly revenues less than $100 million and physician-owned companies are currently excluded from the bill, and they account for more than 75 percent of the companies in the industry 1、由于在专利侵权的法律应诉中“涉嫌误导和迷惑陪审团”，联邦法院决定对美敦力公司处以一千万美元的罚款，明尼阿波利斯明星论坛报报道。这次案件由强生公司DePuy部门提起诉讼，导致医疗设备产商美敦力公司遭受2.26亿美元的损失。
传闻法院记载，在此案件中，“被告不必要地延长审判进程”，而且试图“掩盖、逃避、或者减小”之前联邦法庭的规定。据明星论坛报引用的声明，美敦力计划提起上诉，并且声明“美敦力律师在所有审判问题上都予以了恰当的辩护”。
2、美敦力今天表示，它支持增加医疗设备企业的透明度。明天将会举行关于医疗设备产商给予医生报酬的参议院听证会。该公司在一份提前声明中表示，要求企业公开其与医生经济联系的法案应该比其仅仅提出要更加严格。项法律不能只应用于像美敦力这样的大型产商。公司表示：
这项法案可以也应该走的更远。对这个行业所有的公司都应该实行相同等级的公开性要求，无论其大小如何并包括那些医生全部持有或部分持有的公司。年上缴税不足1亿美元的公司以及医生所有的公司常常被排除在这项法律之外，但是他们却占这个行业所有公司的75%以上。 [标签:content1][标签:content2]
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2011-02-28 17:14
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