Whistleblowers and Why They're Important

Recently, my class listened to our classmates speak on different topics revolving around corruption in the media and their importance. One specific topic that stood out to me was the idea around Whistleblowers. If you're unaware of the subject, according to Find Law, a whistleblower is "an employee who reports a violation of the law by his or her employer." (Whistleblower Protections, 2019) These infractions, or "violations", could be related to unlawful acts, general violations within a company, or something related to or around sexual harassment. Whistleblowers can technically be any employee within a company that discloses information to a third-party source but, they're typically someone whose supposed to be there for whistleblowing purposes.

One recent pharmaceutical company got into trouble with whistleblowers in late April. Two employees reported that company doctors asked that representatives higher prices for a rare infant seizure medicine to boost their sales (Drash, 2019). The prices for these very helpful drugs increased by $97,000%, starting at a price of $40 in the year 2000 to almost $39,000 a vial (Drash, 2019). As of right now, the Justice Department has interfered with this case and has started an investigation of their own. The government doesn't normally intervene with cases from whistleblowers, with a history of only 25% (Drash, 2019). This is a good and bad sign. A good sign because the government actually believes that fraud is happening and they're willing to stop it. But, the government feels that its real enough that tthey need to intervene which is unfortunate. According to Wayne Drash at CNN, "Under the current administration, there does appear to be a real effort to combat various forms of healthcare fraud, and I do know the DOJ is using data analytics to identify doctors who are defrauding the government," she said. "The data could be used very effectively in a case like this" (Drash, 2019). This has been one of the highest increases in medicine today and hopefully it will be the last.






Drash, W. (2019, April 30). Whistleblowers: Drug company bribed doctors to boost sales. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/health/mallinckrodt-whistleblower-lawsuit-acthar/index.html

Whistleblower Protections. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://employment.findlaw.com/whistleblowers/whistleblower-protections.html