Merck-Medco Marketing "Violates Consumer Rights"

A consumer protection settlement covering 17 US states and affecting one in every seven Americans, announced late last month in Minnesota, requires Merck & Co and Medco Containment Services, the prescription drug benefit company acquired by Merck in 1993 for $6 billion, to substantially reform their methods of marketing prescription drugs.

the states say medical information obtained by Medco was used to try to get doctors to switch patients to Merck products, and that failure to disclose important information to prescribing physicians and consumers violated state consumer laws. This changed Medco's historic function of cost-containment to include a marketing function to increase the profits of its parent company, said Minnesota Attorney General Hubert Humphrey. "When health plan managers, who are assumed to be promoting cost-containment, can use confidential information to send prescription business to themselves, you've got the fox guarding the chicken coop," he said. "Patients need to understand that health conglomerates like Merck-Medco may be driven by the profit motive as much as by the cost-containment motive."

Medco's program of telephoning doctors works thus: a doctor prescribes a (non-Merck) drug. When the prescription reaches a Medco mail-service pharmacy, a Medco pharmacist calls the doctor, identifying himself as the patient's pharmacist, and urges the doctor to switch the prescription to a new drug, often made by Merck. The states say the Medco pharmacist's failure to disclose that he is a Medco employee, that Medco is owned by Merck and that the drug is made by merck violates consumer protection laws.