Amarin Corp Plc (AMRN)

[marjac]

Raf,

That is a valid point. The fact pattern that originally interested me and which struck me as litigation worthy against the insurance companies is the following:

Patient walks into the pharmacy with a V prescription.
Pharmacy confirms with insurer whether they will cover V prescription.
Insurer instructs pharmacy to give the patient GL instead of V.
Patient walks out with GL instead of V.

If this actually happens in the real world, then that is something which I feel is litigation worthy from a consumer fraud/class action perspective. If that does not happen, then I do not see much of a case. I am open to persuasion, as I am learning as I go along here from the people on the Board who know much more about these practices than I do.

In terms of medical malpractice, I agree conceptually that it is malpractice for a doctor to prescribe GL to a Reduce-It patient instead of V. But as a practical matter, no attorney takes on a medical malpractice case unless there are seven figures in damages. The reason is that they are expensive to litigate and so difficult to prove in terms of proximate cause.

Even if a Reduce-It patient who is prescribed GL instead of V, has a heart attack a few months later, it is difficult to prevail from a medical malpractice litigation perspective due to the difficulty in proving that the lack of V was the reason for the heart attack, and that the patient would not have had the heart attack anyway. So while we have the "breach" for a medical malpractice claim, the "proximate cause" element is a tough mountain to climb.