Part 3: Bad Systems that Will Cause You to Lose Sight of Customers' Best Interests - Healthcare Edition

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. We are once again diving into scandal today, when business systems go bad. Last Scandal edition, we covered the automotive industry, we covered financial before that. Today, we jump into healthcare, which has a range of especially awful scenarios. We'll touch on a few, judging by the pregame discussion here. This may get a little fired up, but let's get rolling, guys. I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher. Hey, guys. You ready for this? Let's do it. Let's do this. Yes. We want to look at scandals and systems gone sideways in order to spot trends on where these systems broke down. As we've seen from previous shows, these are often failures of really love when you get down to it, empathy. Failures of not viewing things from a conscious capitalist perspective, not having a higher purpose. Failures of just that sole pursuit of profit. This is what happens when you don't build empathy and love into your business or government systems. We're going to touch on three main healthcare scandals. We're going to cover the pharma industry, with Purdue Pharma. Then we'll talk about Theranos. Both of those have been recently featured in Hollywood productions, so you may be familiar with them. And then we'll talk about a lesser known one from the VA. So first up, we're going to talk about Purdue Pharma and Oxy, which many of you are familiar with this. Purdue Pharma implemented aggressive marketing strategies for Oxycontin, misleading health care providers and patients about the drugs' addictiveness and safety. They claim that Oxy had a lower risk of addiction compared to other painkillers, which was untrue. Sales reps were trained to downplay the risks of addiction and encouraged doctors to prescribe higher doses. And Purdue used a now-infinite marketing phrase called pseudo addiction, suggesting that patients displaying addiction-like behaviors were actually just in need of more pain medication. The company targeted high-prescribing doctors and provided financial incentives to them including free trips and speaking fees. So they can't really commission people, but there are ways around this. The practice increased prescriptions and, of course, exasperated the addiction crisis. The FDA failed here to adequately scrutinize Purdue's claims about Oxy. The initial approval of the drug did not account for its high potential for abuse. They gave it a label stating that the delayed absorption of the drug was believed to reduce its abuse liability. So this claim was based on minimal evidence and later proved to be misleading, and Purdue basically just ran with this. Despite the mounting evidence of widespread abuse and addiction, regulatory bodies didn't take swift action to curtail Oxy's marketing or impose stricter controls.
Purdue internally, they prioritized sales over profits, sales and profits over patient sales. So the company's leadership, particularly the Sackler family, pushed for higher sales without regard to the consequences. And then you see after this, there's a lot of court cases. Internal documents revealed that the executives were aware of the potential for abuse and just chose to ignore it to chase those profits again. And so the company continued to promote that drug aggressively as evidence of its abuse mounted. So employees, again, we see this in all these other systems who raise concerns about this, were pretty much ignored or silenced. I think, you know, guys, first off, as a marketing agency, I can't imagine the horror about this just because, you know, we've done marketing for things like allergy medicine, but it's pretty benign stuff. But in this world, I know there's just a lot, a lot of regulatory compliance that you have to go through on things you can say and can't say. And Purdue just seemed to go way over the top in pursuing, hey, if we could just say this one thing instead of this other thing, no concern for the reality on the ground is they just wanted to be able to say this one thing over this other thing, because that would just open the doors for them.
And I think there's a lot of people along this whole chain who trust what they're being told, right? I mean, there's the system from pharma is really broken if something like this can happen just because a couple of individuals are in there are able to just manipulate something and everyone else is like, well, this is what we got, you know, government approval on this. We can say this. So there's something I think inherently wrong when it comes to just having incentives in this system. And it's more appalling to seeing goals like increased consumption. And Ash, what is especially upsetting here, it's that purposeful exploitation of especially vulnerable people in pursuit of the profits. What were they doing in that regard?