by
Thomas Dworetzky, Contributing Reporter | March 28, 2016
On the heels of getting hit with a record-breaking $646 million settlement to stop what U.S. investigators dubbed a "greed-fueled kickback scheme," according to NPR, Olympus emails now show that this behavior reached new heights. After the superbug outbreak linked to its scopes, it then sought to profiteer off of the supply crisis its bad equipment created — jacking up prices for urgently needed replacement scopes.
"What Olympus did was outrageous," Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance)
told the Los Angeles Times. "They jacked up the prices and made even more money off their defective scopes and then bragged about it. Have they no shame?"
Just a few days after
the massive settlement, Vincent Hernandez, Olympus Corp. sales manager, emailed Ronald Reagan Medical Center doctors who were desperately seeking loaner scopes, to report that "Supplies are already low, where demand is high with all academic institutions expanding their inventories."
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He then offered to sell them 35 new ones for $1.2 million — a whopping 28 percent price boost from just months before, according to the emails that the paper got through a public-records request.
The demand was boosted in part as new cleaning methods created in response to the superbug outbreak meant that health care centers had to have more scopes available to keep up with patient flow.
The price boost showed a distinct chilling in what had been a very close relationship between the company and UCLA. For example, a Jan. 7, 2015, email, just weeks before the UCLA outbreak that killed three, Dr. Raman Muthusamy, the director of endoscopy at UCLA, had looked for money for a medical conference from the company.
"Quick question: Who do I speak to about sponsorship from Olympus to the Mellinkoff symposium," Muthusamy emailed two Olympus workers, including Hernandez. "Last year, Olympus gave $18,000 — this year only $10K. Given our increasing collaborations thought it should at least stay the same."
A few weeks later, Olympus salesman Richard Ramirez thanked a UCLA doctor for allowing him and another company representative "to sit in on a few of your cases yesterday."
The superbug outbreak, which became clear Jan. 28, 2015, put a stop to the cordiality.
